By BRUCE DENNILL
Alan Committie: Fast & (Reasonably) Furious / Directed by Christopher Weare / Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino Theatre, Fourways, Johannesburg
One of the first jokes the sharp-eyed ticket buyer will enjoy in this show is that very little of what is mentioned in the various bits of promotional material actually happens on stage. There is no Johan van der Walt, there is a shortage of egg jokes, and there is no complimentary interval. Such are the challenges of writing comedy around current affairs when said affairs will not be as current once you actually start performing the show.
For Alan Committie, a script is always a bonus, though, not a necessity. And while many notable events of the last year – the Rugby World Cup win, the coronation of King Charles and, er, the release of the tenth Fast & Furious movie – do retain their place in this show’s narrative, they are more useful chapter markers than major reasons to attend.
Other moments that Committie fans (Committie members? Sounds to much like a body corporate…) will always be on the lookout for are trademark skits that include interpretive dance – preferably in a leotard, but that is sadly never a guarantee – and a flip chart that somehow links two disparate concepts in a way that is always hilarious and which generally shows you that you’re not keeping up with the performer’s processing power.
What is perhaps most impressive, however, is Committie’s comfort with improvisation, which is such that it’s more or less impossible – except in those moments where he highlights that he has only just thought of something in the moment – to tell if he’s working off a script or making something up completely off the cuff. Much of the impetus for that part of the show comes from audience interaction, which is always different and often quite odd, depending on the group of people in the room that night. In the performance under review, for instance, one audience member felt that calling out loudly – ostensibly supportive, if not terribly relevant, words – was a worthwhile contribution (which it really wasn’t, speaking as a fellow audience member). He might have seemed like an obvious contender for interaction, but Committie’s sense of where a thread could go once started meant that he turned to other, initially less chatty crowd members and cleverly knitted their sometimes dry responses into ever-developing stories that take hilariously unlikely directions.
Fast & (Reasonably) Furious provides a great framework in which a reliably funny and very often hysterical comic can work his genial, incisive magic. The finer details of the performance you see after reading this review will be different, but it is to Committie’s great credit that guaranteeing that it will be just as funny is in no way false advertising.
