Long Tooth Edinburgh preview at Etcetera

It’s Edinburgh preview time in the Smoke again and it’s always interesting. You might see an act which is very close to being a big Edinburgh hit and you might see a train crash; it can go either way. The venue is the Etcetera Theatre above the Oxford Arms on the very salubrious Camden High Street, which is running a season of Edinburgh previews. The space is intimate (tiny)and very hot under theatre lights, but very friendly.

Long Tooth is the duo Vivienne Gibbs and Trudi Jackson playing the characters of Liz and Julie who live together, play together and perform together. The duo archetype they adopt is the dominant, bullying character and the buffoon who always manages to subvert the process and gets the laughs in the end, a tradition going back through Laurel and Hardy, all the way to Shakespeare.

The theme of the show is a quick-fire journey backwards and forwards in time to Liz’s favourite scenes with onstage costume changes for Liz covered by the magician’s distraction technique of focussing the audience on interludes of singing, dancing, pouting and even body-popping from Julie. The performance looks tightly scripted (or very well improvised) as the duo work their way from Joan of Arc through Walter Raleigh and Marie Antoinette to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. It’s difficult to tell if the show is loose or under-rehearsed because that’s exactly the effect they’re aiming for and they succeed perfectly as the costume changes become increasingly manic and shambolic.

There are virtually no punch-line type gags in the show, which relies on the script, the interaction between the performers themselves and the breaking down of the conventional theatrical divide between the performers and the audience. In this show, the conventional wisdom of keeping out of trouble by avoiding the front row won’t necessarily help, particularly in a small theatre like this, but at least you won’t be humiliated. The show has a little bit of everything – dressing up, singing, dancing, a Benny Hill-type chase at the end and snippets of great music, including Ike & Tina Turner’s version of “Proud Mary”.

The verdict – if had paid to see this show, I wouldn’t have been disappointed. There’s bags of energy, anarchy, a bit of satire and plenty of subversion of the normal theatrical conventions. The audience on the night I saw it (all 20 of us) absolutely loved it. If you’re in Edinburgh for the Festival, go and see it.