Reviews

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Michael Brunström: Copernicus Now

I forgot to ask Michael Brunström if his show title is a deliberate Seinfeld reference. (SERENITY NOW!) – but I reckon it's reasonably likely. Brunström, a former Malcolm Hardee Award winner for Comic Originality, always makes shows that interrogate the nature of comedy.

In this show, his first Fringe in five years, he divides comedy into two categories – and attempts to break through and create a third – and more unifying kind. Ostensibly about the 16th century Polish astronomer Copernicus, this is also a show that celebrates playfulness, curiosity and a willingness to change the world for the better.

Brunström's performance includes elements of slapstick, pantomime and dance – as well as revealing his surprisingly mellifluous singing voice. The fact that it takes place in a small yurt with elbow room only, does nothing to quell his theatrical ambition. His props, such as they are, appear to have been transported to the venue in a giant Lidl bag which perches at the side of the stage. He encourages us to cheer at equations, to join in with a line dancing routing and to imagine ourselves hurtling through the universe, at the heart of an epoch-changing paradigm shift. Ist it too late for us to rescue the earth? Can we change comedy? Can we save the planet?

The heart-lifting finale encourages us to believe it is not too late. There is still hope. Brunström is a delightful presence, odd, eager and erudite – with a solicitous care for his audience. A true comedy original it is a joy to spend time in his company. He's only here for a short run but do take the time to see him if you can. If you're looking for the real Fringe, it's here.

Michael Brunström: Copernicus Now

... Michael Brunström’s show is about hope; about how the world is in dire straits both environmentally and politically, and how we desperately need the hope of a new way of looking at things – a paradigm shift.   

And as a model for just how completely to overturn preconceived ideas, he offered us – Nicolaus Copernicus.    Just to bring us all up to speed – here’s Wikipedia:  ‘Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its centre.’

If you’ve read this far, I’ll bet you’re looking back at the title – “I thought this was about a comedy   show …”.  Well, it is; and Michael Brunström is the funniest standup I’ve seen in a long time: both in his words and his physical comedy, and he kept a capacity audience at The Yellow Book in pretty much constant laughter for almost an hour.

Brunström’s a big man, but after he’d burst onto the stage, he rushed off for a second, and then – oozed – back into the room through the half-open door.  Almost two-dimensional … and it seemed he was weightless, as he sort of – floated – up against one of the walls, arms widely stretched as though he was drifting in space.

Because it’s space that interests him in this show.  The Universe – well, at least the Solar System.

Brunström explained a bit about the Ptolemaic model of the universe – you’ll have to Google Ptolemy for yourselves as I haven’t got the space here to give you everything about a Greek astronomer from 150 AD.  Suffice it to say that the Earth is right at the centre – Brunström produced an enormous inflatable globe which he passed to a rather frightened-looking audience member, and gave out cardboard discs with the names of the planets on.   In Ptolemy’s model the planets rode round the Earth on nested crystal spheres – but the Yellow Book’s budget wouldn’t run to those, so we just passed the planets along the rows of seats, as a kind of Poundland Ptolemy.

Brunström put the disco into discovery  ...

He can really work his audience, too – at the close he had us on our feet, stretching upwards, trying to FEEL the motion of the planet.

His delivery got more intense, almost like some evangelist preacher offering Redemption, but in Brunström’s case his vision took us out, beyond the planets and the Solar System, to the billions of other stars in the Milky Way, and out again to the billions of other galaxies “cavorting across the fabric of space-time …”    

Wow!  The point of all this was to give us a little bit of the awe – and fear – that Copernicus would have felt, when he realised that the story he’d been given … just wasn’t the reality.  Wasn’t enough.

On a personal note – sometimes I look towards the Sun; and instead of seeing it ‘up there’, I alter my conceptual viewpoint and choose to see it ‘there at the centre’, as though we’re swinging round it like on some wild fairground ride.  Which in a way, we are.

Michael Brunström’s show gave me the same sense of dizziness.  If you get a chance to see it – I guarantee you’ll never look at a sunrise or a sunset in the same way, ever again.

Michael Brunström: World of Sports

There really isn’t any comedian like Michael Brunström, or if there is I’ve never seen one and over the past three decades I’ve seen thousands (admittedly many hundreds of those were on the open mic circuit, but hey, it still counts as there are some superb comics on it). I only saw him live for the first time last year too when he performed his The Great Fire Of London show but he instantly became one of my favourite comedians and the gig itself made it in to my list of the ten best I’ve ever been fortunate to witness.

So when I heard he was doing his latest show I bought tickets the moment it was announced, and had been eagerly awaiting the chance to see it. It didn’t disappoint either, in it’s current state it’s not quite as good as The Great Fire Of London but it’s bloody close, and would make it in to my twenty favourite comedy shows list with ease. Michael commented during the show that one segment may be dropped when it comes to it’s Edinburgh run too, suggesting this it’s still being worked upon, but either way it’s a stunning piece of comedy and something I absolutely adored.

Describing the show in depth would spoil the effect for anyone planning to see it (which should be every single person who reads this as it really is that great) so I’ll keep this vague, but the framing device is that Michael wants to win gold at the Olympics and so partakes in a number of different sports – but bar a couple of well known events very few of them are the kind of thing you’ll see at the Olympics, though after tonight’s gig I’m convinced they should all be included.

It’s a completely unpredictable work and that’s partially why it’s so special, you never know what he’ll offer up next, be it a monologue about the event (or something else entirely), an unusual piece of audience interaction, or a physical display involving various props and devices that never fail to delight. And another joyful element of his comedy is the audience participation, but he’s the kind of comedian who never picks on his audience or makes them do anything they may not want to do, he just makes us all part of the show and reacts and builds on what the audience does or says. This makes him pretty unique in my mind, and every performance will be a little different due to this, but I’m absolutely convinced that each will be just as enjoyable if not more so than what I was lucky enough to see tonight.

A show so fantastic that I definitely plan to catch it again, I have no doubt in my mind it’ll be one of the very best things the Edinburgh Festival has to offer, and if it doesn’t win Brunström awards then the world is even crueller and unfair than I already suspect it to be. One of the funniest men alive, I’m aware that this review is full of what might seem like hyperbole but it’s genuinely not, Brunström’s comedy is the art form at it’s very best and will make you laugh until it hurts so much you might fear you’ll need a hospital visit after witnessing it. 

Michael Brunström: Parsley

Nothing is as pointlessly silly as it might seem in Michael Brunström's latest opus, Parsley. Not his blowing balls of paper off a book at the floor, not his garnishing us with sprigs of parsley. OK, some things are. The singing of made-up Cockney market songs, the metronome snogging and the frequent appearances of George Orwell singing easy-listening classings. Brunström's book of New Material, from which we read, goes beyond silly, past surreal and comes back to just hilariously funny.

We, as an audience, are called upon frequently and for increasingly absurd reasons. We sing, we sift fact from non-fact and we cheer for our respective parsleys (curly or flat leaf), in whose name we battle, the air full of tiny planes. We play slide whistles, recreate seminal moments in the history of parsley and come up with a multiplicity of thyme-based puns. All just a waste of thyme? Absolutely not.

Brunström's shows are things of beauty and love. The bloke in front of me sat arms folded and stone-faced throughout. Each time I hooted with laughter, he turned and looked at me askance. I feel very, very sorry for this man. Learn to love Michael. It will enrich your live. 

Michael Brunström: The Hay Wain Reloaded

Michael Brunström offers, inter alia, an hour with John Constable, culminating in a recreation of his masterpiece The Hay Wain, the chance to becomes Willy Lott's Cottage or a handsome spaniel and a chance to play Elgar's Cello Concerto on Noel Edmunds.

Do not worry how unlikely that sounds because it all makes sense once you are there, taking your place in the Suffolk landscape. Although I am a mere tree in the background I am fully engaged in Brunström's narrative, many of the salient points offered with simultaneous translation into bongo, for those of us who speak percussion.

We learn – through a trio of short sketches involving a game of Deal or No Deal, a monochrome minidressed Mary Quant and Anita Dobson en deshabille singing 'Anyone Can Fall in Love' in a Marvel character mask – about the three pillars of the masterpiece that is The Hay Wain: Nature, Work and Nostalgia. How these sketches illuminate our understanding of nature, work and nostalgia is up for debate, quite frankly, but Brunström's skills as a a game host, Mary's gripping tales of her time harpooning whales off the coast of Newfoundland and Anita – well, you really have to see Anita for yourself – are so sense-bendingly entertaining that understanding is really not the point.

Brunström's epiphany at the end of the show is both moving and extremely messy. And the results are available for sale, after the show. After all this, we are as appalled as he that The Hay Wain only reached No. 2 in the Nation's Favourite Painting poll. Go for the great merchandise, go for the marvellous classical music, go for a game of beachball. But most of all go for some great, crazy, never to be forgotten comedy.

MIchael Brunström: The Hay Wain Reloaded

Michael Brunström beguiles the Fringe once more with a curious and captivating hour on the nation’s second favourite painting.

Nothing is predictable in Michael Brunström’s The Hay Wain Reloaded, as we might expect from the winner of last year's Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality. Nothing, that is, besides the mention of The Hay Wain – John Constable’s most celebrated work.

Beginning the hour as Constable himself, Brunström delves into the mind of an artistic genius (both Constable's and his own), highlighting the key themes of The Hay Wain: nostalgia, work and nature. Through a series of vignettes, we soon learn how Constable’s painting embodies such unexpected figures as Noel Edmonds, Mary Quant and Anita Dobson. We also find that Brunstrӧm is the sole patron of the Hay Wain giftshop; beach balls are for sale on exit.

While it is perhaps not quite as sharp as 2015’s The Golden Age of Steam in places, it more than makes up for this in its clever and coherent structure. This makes it a little easier to follow and Brunström is a charming guide. In all, The Hay Wain Reloaded is a ramshackle, surrealist delight.

Michael Brunström: The Hay Wain Reloaded

Sister Wendy was never like this. Absurdist Michael Brunstrom offers a most eccentric take on art history, relating the story of John Constable’s masterpiece in a way just as likely to bemuse as amuse.

He uses the painting primarily as a jumping-off point for three surreal, extended sketches about Noel Edmonds’s deepest secrets, fashion icons whaling off Nova Scotia and a scene involving a 1990s celebrity that’s virtually indescribable. Or at least you wouldn’t believe it, if it were to be described.

For whatever you say about Brunstrom, you cannot fault his commitment to the weirdness. Dance like nobody’s watching, they say, and he applies the same ethos to acting out crazy ideas which the more easily embarrassed might keep in their heads. Instead, he heaps oddness upon oddness.

The risk of self-indulgence is ever-present, though Brunstrom mostly sidesteps it. Nonetheless, he is clearly amusing himself first and never forces his strangeness, just invites the audience to share in his unselfconscious performance. There’s always a bit of distance, though, making it difficult to get completely immersed in this very alternate world, for all that’s admirable about his distinctiveness.

That’s not to say the show is without the near-obligatory audience interaction, which is well-handled, with the aim of making his ‘volunteers’ feel like playmates in the fantasy world he’s creating. Brunstrom breaks the ice by instigating a couple of in-jokes, and by making himself the victim in an hilariously silly reading of a Wordsworth poem against the odds.

There are plenty of laughs, too, at the sheer audacity of his eccentric ambition and the bizarre juxtapositions he evokes. Sometimes, too, there’s more than that, a wry aside, a strong, silly idea, or subtle breaks in his pretence that make it more than just randomness.

For there is a purpose, however cockeyed, here. While the three main skits allegedly show Constable’s triple inspirations – nature, work and nostalgia – they are loosely splattered onto a canvas that purports to show something of Constable’s world: his defiance of the fashionable romanticism so prevalent at the time, or the disappointment his industrialist father must have felt at his son’s early failings to make an impact in an insecure career.

We can only imagine if there are parallels in Brunstrom’s life as he stands in front of us in his unflattering underwear, bucking the mainstream trend for everyday anecdotes in favour of unabashed absurdity.

Will future generations come to see Brunstrom as a visionary artist? Come back to me in 200 years…