- Review by Carla Lever

So, one man and a bag full of blow up dolls go to dinner. Intrigued? I certainly was.

…which is how I found myself in the audience for Blow, a one man, all-rubber extravaganza starring Renos Spanoudes and a heck of a lot of plastic breasts.

 

Spanoudes goes out on the proverbial limb with this one, playing various characters, all of them seeking to assuage their loneliness by forging relationships (of various kinds) with plastic sex aids.

A play this risqué could only have gone one of two ways. For me, it went south. And pretty quickly.

The comedy, as befits an Out the Box submission, was very physical. Unfortunately, the timing wasn’t quite there. Gestures that might perhaps, in the hands of a Rob van Vuuren or Mark Sampson, have had great comedic potential came across as awkward or overly-choreographed. Staging techniques like flashes of action stills that should have been effective somehow failed to hit their mark, leaving awkward transitions between set pieces.

 

To be fair, it is hard to create stage chemistry when your other half’s mouth is stretched into a permanent obscene leer and, to a certain extent, that’s the point. I am quite sure there is meant to be layering and textures to this piece beyond the immediate comic effect – the characters tend to live deeply isolated and lonely lives, highlighting the pathos of their fetish all the more starkly. For me, though, this just wasn’t communicated. The piece was too awkward to be funny and too hysterical to be moving.

Spanoudes was at his best playing a widowed woman uncovering her late husband’s obsession – it was here that I caught glimpses of what the piece could have been. For the most part, though, I felt this one was a little too much hot air.

In today’s RATE THE DATE, I ask Nicole, a gender student from UCT, what she thought of the piece.

“I felt uncomfortable and awkward because something that risqué needs to be handled really well and, for me, this just wasn’t. It could have been cool if it had been a bit funnier or if it went completely the opposite way and was really moving, but it didn’t do either for me.”

Blow carries an age restriction of 16+ and plays again on:
Sat 3 September 17:30,
Sun 4 September 13:00,
Sun 4 September 21:00,
Mon 5 September 20:00.

Tickets are R50 and bookings can be made through Computicket.

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