Review: The Portrait at Trades Hall
Review by Greg Gorton
Popular theatre-maker Clare Bartholomew, working with performers Emilie Bloom and Tim Sneddon, has made a show that is going to have a lot of people laughing. The Portrait is a physical comedy piece that calls upon all the greats on stage and screen, set around those simple tropes we all know well. It’s one of the Fringe shows you can safely call “fun for the whole family”, and the kids will enjoy it as much as mum and dad - maybe even more.
In The Portrait, Tim Sneddon plays a security guard, excited to be the one to pull the cord on a new exhibit at the art gallery. Alone he prepares the area, readies himself for the anticipated crowd, and does his best not to peek behind the curtain. But when Emilie Bloom is brought in to provide support, a classic odd-couple scenario ensues. Over the hour, the guards and the gallery itself start to fall apart.
The set, by Mike Finch, is simple and elegant, with the thick drapes over the painting, and the gold, tasselled cord ready to be pulled. There is a simple sign saying when the exhibit will open, a small plaque that tells anyone close enough (no audience member) what the artwork is, and later some useful security measures that also make for fun props. The story (and comedy) of the night is greatly enhanced with incredible creation/curation of sound effects by Steph O’Hara.
While Sneddon and Bloom play the classic odd couple, they also do so with very different styles of physical comedy. Sneddon is the “silent actor”, getting far more laughs from his expressions of consternation or fear than from anything he is actually doing while pulling these faces. His timing when it comes to double-takes will work in most comedies, and the acting itself is just exaggerated enough to have you thinking about Buster Keaton or Marcel Marceau, but no further.
At the other end, Bloom is your slapstick and pratfall clown, who garners laughter by being able to slip over five times in a row and get up with a smile. Bloom puts an incredible amount of energy and skill into these stunts, and is the agent of chaos you might expect from a child’s birthday party filled with sugar.
It’s an interesting choice to attempt to play these two styles at once, and I’m not entirely sure it works. To attempt a theatrical analogy, I could only imagine it like trying to stage Waiting for Godot as a hip-hop musical. That said, I’m sure many theatre goers will be saying “wow, I’d see that one too!”. For me, it was a discordant visual presentation by two extremely talented performers. Enough audience members had no trouble with this, however, and at times seemed to double their laughter in seeing the two very different comedic events at once.
Another choice I struggled with was the active decision to have it be a “wordless satire”. Yes, it is technically true that (except for one or two quick lines) there were no English words used in this show, there was certainly a lot of simlish and grunts that were used instead of finding clever physical ways to communicate what the characters wanted to say. Here my mind went straight to the answer found by Rowan Atkinson, in which Mr Bean could talk, but didn’t really want to.
Of course, in the continued digression of both my mind and this review, I also wondered about how short a single “scene” of Mr Bean was, and that Buster Keaton’s “The General” was only about fifteen minutes longer than this show and contained so much more. It must be so difficult to create a full hour narrative show using these techniques, and so those near-perfect tik-tok-lengthen moments of physical prowess sometimes end up being more focussed on than the comedy of character and story.
If you are a fan of physical comedy, or are looking for a family-friendly show for this year’s Fringe, The Portrait is a very safe bet for not letting anyone be disappointed. Is it fringe? Not really, but it is funny.
