Kraken

The recent resurgence of mime at the Fringe, epitomised by Doctor Brown’s triumph at the comedy awards two years ago, has been a pleasant surprise. But it brings the risk that the still relatively small pool of top-notch performers of this arcane art are forever compared against each other, to the detriment of those who are very good, but not quite great. There’s no getting away from the comparisons between Brown and Trygve Wakenshaw. For a start, his show is performed in the same, ideal black-box space of the Belly Button as was Brown’s award-winning stormer; more importantly, he practices a similar brand of very adult mime, played out with an air of joyful, child-like innocence.

Wakenshaw’s relationship with his audience is almost like that of an enthusiastic toddler, totally consumed by his own roleplay game and insisting that we join in. This sort of faux naivety makes the transgressive content—nudity, scatology, suggestions of homosexual lust—somehow more palatable and more shocking at once. He performs with a pure and raw physicality that all but completely hides any sense of the person beneath, simultaneously drawing us in with a crooked smile and a sort of blinking bewilderment, expressing amazement at what he—and we—are prepared to do in the service of a laugh.

There are moments of sheer, giddy, hysteria that have much of the audience doubled up; I honestly can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard than at the baby bird sketch, where the combination of innocence and vulgarity reaches its zenith. For me, these laughs could have been more carefully built and more solidly maintained, and the audience interactions could have gone that bit further, to present a genuine risk of things going wrong. Even so, this has to be one of the most fall-about, wet-yourself laughing hours at this year’s Fringe.