Goose: Kablamo

“Sweat tornado!” If there’s one image that sticks in the mind after this exhausting onslaught of ideas and energy, it’s the great spray of perspiration arcing off Adam Drake’s head every time he does something wonderfully dramatic. Which is often. It takes you back to the 1980s heyday of soul star Alexander O’Neill, drenching the front row of his grateful audience in buckets of salty soul-juice with every neck jerk. By the end of this bravura performance, Drake could probably get his audience to do pretty much anything too. And, indeed, he does.

Goose is a comedy collective with just one performer: this is officially a multi-person one-man show. But don’t dwell on the details; Goose is all about Drake, a ginger whirlwind of visual gags, wordplay and puns, some of them painful but all whizzing past at such a rate that you’re too busy keeping up to think too hard. In Goose-space, nobody can hear you groan.

Kablamo is a spy film pastiche in which Drake plays multiple characters, leaping back and forth, with added twirls for flashbacks and scene changes. So far, so silly, but along the way there are curious bits of dialogue that don’t quite scan, and are gone before you can ponder them properly. This all turns out to be the kernel of a fiendish plot twist, which eventually ties together all loose ends, brings together a couple of previously distant audience members, and causes absolute uproar in this hot little box. Breathtaking.

Goose, then: well worth a gander.