Quiche At Camden Fringe: A Comedy Slice Of Sexual Politics

Lotus Productions ‘Quiche’ has come to the Camden Fringe, and offers punters a sharp hour long play punctuated with hysterically funny lines and well placed poignancy. The audience were laughing loud and settling back comfortably for more every time.

Over the course of one night we see couple Jenny and John explore every facet of their love when their friends, Jo and Jake, pop round for some quiche. Alcohol, power plays, dissatisfaction and desire all do their work.

While the comedy is laugh a minute (with a higher ratio than that in places) the themes are very adult and intense. Is being in a couple the start or the end of your sexual identity, or both? How satisfied should we, or do we, feel in our lives, at work and at home, and slotting between other people?

The play moves along nicely, and the cast really gels together, all of the emotions, all of the gags: they fit perfectly, and the entire cast renders everything so well that the characters win you over, even where their actions perhaps shouldn’t.

Ella Turk-Thompson and Michael Williams admirably anchor the play with their independent yet intrinsically linked characters Jenny and John. Wherever the night takes us, we can see at least one, but often multiple, angles of their relationship bouncing alongside – whether nicely, nastily or comically.

Ellie Mason’s Jo and Frank McHugh’s Jake are wonderful creations. Ghastly, horrifying, then sad, both actors have to fill a lot of differently shaped spaces in the play, and they do so flawlessly. Jo trips between comically awful and crass and vulnerable. Jake has to be a sod, a formidable lover and a mate, and constantly pitches between friend and foe to the others in different ways.

Quiche is a fantastic little play with a very warm heart. You’re really rooting for Jenny and John, and so the comedy can really take you anywhere, hysterically, without you feeling mean for laughing at the highs and lows of their evening, love life and social skills.

Quiche is at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden until Sunday. Shows at 8:30

http://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=504

The Grass is Always Greener – ‘Quiche’ at the Marlborough Theatre, Brighton

‘Quiche’ is a comedy by Frank McHugh.

The tl;dr version is ‘Brilliantly executed laugh out loud comedy with well-placed bittersweet-ness.’
The cast, writing and production are excellent and if you go you’ll have a thoroughly good night.

If you want more…


What do men and women want? They’re after one thing, right? Right…

‘Quiche’ offers two couples (perhaps more) and yet it really shows four people who are alone.

It doesn’t matter how nice you make that flat, how many times you move things around or invite people in or turn up the music; you’re still beating against the walls to feel something, anything that isn’t that awful gulf between you and the person you should be deep inside.

Dinner party etiquette. British social status etiquette. You congratulate people on the things you don’t think they do as well as you. To stay charming you admit to the faults in yourself that you don’t think are faults – just like when recruiters prepare you for interviews.

What do they call it? Owning the space? You walk in and you need to be confident, knowledgeable, talkative and competitive. Fail at this and you are getting ‘being in company’ wrong.

But of course they are getting it wrong. Which is why ‘Quiche’ is hysterically funny. These people are not qualified to be as self-assured as they are. Inwardly disappointed and outwardly crass characters hurtle towards sex – which will probably be quite similar in nature.

To get them there there’s inter-couple and intra-couple bitching. There’s bottomless glasses of wine, well-aimed insults, seething stares, hubris, and mixed reactions to the quiche.

Raging alongside are the coping mechanisms for the disappointment. The pride in the job you’re not really that good at or interested in. The men fist bump over echo-chamber recruitment and marketing wank; the women play career-fulfilment top trumps.

And one woman’s faults are another woman’s man’s strengths. You match your candidates to the roles. ‘Match’ is a relative term in Quiche’s world. You’re crying with laughter – and two emotions are causing that.

It’s farce that makes you pay for it. If there’s a pratfall then you’re going to have to deal with the scars it leaves behind. Sitting in audience land, you find yourself trying to suppress the tail end of your barrel laugh to keep up with a gear change into emotional consequences.

It’s life. Your emotions have to take you through some incredibly extreme heights and depths of ridiculous behaviour before you can start to see yourself – and see problems in your life clearly enough to be able to address them.

Quiche starts with four people who are alone. But that’s definitely not how it ends.


'Quiche' is at the Marlborough Theatre tonight at 19:45 and Saturday 18^th July at 14:45 and 19:45

Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/1635221

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Quiche-at-the-Marlborough-Theatre-16-18-July/462460607253680

Brighton Fringe: Why not go and see 'Infection'?

Brighton Fringe is here and there are many, many things to go and see all over the city. But for the moment the most important and unmissable thing is Bath Street Productions’ Infection, a play by Faye Woodbridge. And it’s on next week.

Two brothers and a brotherly/sisterly mate, into their twenties but barely, are trying to survive a zombie apocalypse (caused by an alien infection). As for their families, friends, civilisation...

Kids v. zombies (aliens) [the beautiful pedantry here]. It’s the culture clash – almost nothing can dent youth culture. Almost nothing.

It’s funny and it has a heart, it’s sending up the genres, it has the confidence and competence to be silly – it’s very Brighton. ‘Brighton’ usually results in a warm feeling when you find it in a venue, that familiarity of the local vibe.

There’s something about the early twenties: old enough and experienced enough to live, and yet also not. There’s the transatlantic youth culture. Into everything, always on. Show them a challenge and they want to compete and triumph. Energy, humour, fearlessness… Teflon optimism and enthusiasm between elastic bouts of drama and depression. The best years of their lives and they can still cry out in the rain in sopping hoodies.

And kids die. Accidents and health and crime do for us all, regardless of age. Seeing them face it, or the prospect of it, is electric. Infection has them facing death (the walking dead and mortality) from the start.

Young heroes, when they are truly both things, are fascinating subjects. Kids emulate adults in their own way, because being more grown up than your peers or the younger kids is the height of cool, prowess… whatever. And, more genuinely, life doesn’t pull its punches just because you’re young. Tough and rough shit happens. Kids recognise it and deal with it. They are often forced to learn the mechanics of adult stuff, and they perfect a face to put on when they need to be brave on adult terms.

But they are kids. In Infection, everything they meet has to have a precedent in a movie or TV show. They quiver and falter – vocally, physically and mentally – wondering why there’s no one to pull them off the front line. And they are heroes. They are faltering but they press on, using all the resources they have. They are fighting for each other and being incredible for each other. Just getting on with it is the heroic part: what’s the point in resenting the situation you’re in? It is what it is.

That bit in The History Boys, about lines in books that throw back the thoughts you imagined were yours alone and impossible to articulate:

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”

Experiencing a moment like that in the theatre, spoken, is a very different thing. With it literally voiced for you, you fill in the backstory and gaps in the dialogue from your own experiences and thoughts. And on stage the character is running on, speeding past that particular potent passage, so you hear the rest of the monologue or exchange as an extra layer of sensory experience as your thoughts about the characters and the universality of life’s stuff go deeper.

I suppose theatre is about leaving space, margins. It’s using the right evocative phrases and shifts in topic to give the audience enough to go on – so they can run their own imagery alongside the performance, fleshing it out even more, and personally.

And the space Infection’s characters inhabit, the youth space, is about wrenching you between the deep, sad and profound, and the laughable, cocky and ephemeral. The kids with huge and near-breaking hearts are also sticklers for correct jargon, slang and cultural references – the embryonic adulthood. They are big kids and small adults simultaneously and constantly.

And did I mention the zombies (aliens)?

Infection is at Upstairs at Three and Ten on 13^th-15^th May (18:30) and 17^th-18^th May (13:00)

Tickets available here: http://www.otherplacebrighton.co.uk/performances.php?eventId=3290%3A661

Bath Street Productions: https://www.facebook.com/BathStreetProductions