Seymour Mace in Testamental - Bible Stories Told By an Idiot

Anyone who’s walked the streets of the Toon on a Saturday night would be forgiven for greeting with scepticism a bible lesson from a Geordie. It’s not that Newcastle is a godless place... no, actually, that’s precisely it.

It’s doubtful that Seymour Mace would disagree: he casts the snake at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge with such a thick Geordie accent as to fairly closely associate his native Northeast with Satanic powers. Such is the tone of Testamental: Bible Stories Told by an Idiot – outrageous falsehoods at the expense of the Good Book told with such a disarming delivery that even der panzerkardinal would have to chuckle.

Mace possesses a talent for injecting an overdose of whimsy into the dryest text in history. God’s omnipotence is cast in cartoon slapstick terms, his interactions with man becoming a desperate search for mates. His unabashedly deviant imagination conjures startling and desperately funny scenarios for the spread of life on earth, what Isaac and Abraham talked about on the walk home, and – with drawings – 101 uses for the circumcised foreskin.

You’ll definitely never wank in front of your cat again.

Building slowly towards his best material, Mace at first doesn’t seem to have sufficient energy for the task at hand. He benefits, though, from total ease before a small audience in a venue as intimate as a front room; indeed, as the pace gathers, the show deteriorates into a series of parlour games, ending in a damp crotch for one unlucky punter – what other Sunday school can promise that?