Gilded Balloon at the Museum
Until August 30
16:15
For me, the eighties was one of the greatest decades for American movies ever seen. Ewoks, Terminators, Robocops, Ghostbusters, Brat Pack brilliance—it was non-stop. It was also the decade when Spielberg was in his champagne-popping pomp, at the start of which, in 1981, he gave us a paean to his adventure-comic-reading youth—Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Harrison Ford was born to play Indiana Jones, swear down, & his performance in the first is especially embedded in my brain. Back in the 80s, on a Sunday in my family house in Burnley, Lancashire, whoever got up first out of me & my sister got to pick the morning’s VHS video, taped off the telly one Christmas. My sister would choose either Grease or Dirty Dancing, while I would invariably watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. Totally inspir’d my life, actually. Last year I was off hunting Pictish symbols among the Sámi shaman in Finland, getting there red-line-streaking-across-the-map like Indy—Edinburgh to Stockholm, then a boat to Turku—having a romantic liaison on the boat en route.
“I didn’t know you knew how to build a carboard plane?”
“Build one, yeah, land one, no!”
Yeah, I effing love Indiana Jones! But did I love INDY!, a brand-new Fringe creation from a couple of lads with serious form in the art of affectionate pop-culture demolition. Daniel Clarkson co-created the phenomenally successful Potted Potter and Potted Panto, while Brendan Murphy is the mind behind FRIEND (The One With Gunther) and Buffy Revamped. Produced by Seabright Live, directed by Olivier nominee Owen Lewis, & joined onstage by Victoria Blunt, the trio have set themselves the magnificently daft task of squeezing the original Indiana Jones trilogy into about 70 minutes, armed with homemade props, shadow puppets, frantic costume changes & what they themselves describe as “misplaced confidence.” After previewing the piece at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall, they’ve brought it north for its Fringe premiere at Gilded Balloon at the Museum—a rather appropriate place, when you think about it, for three amateur archaeologists to start messing about with Indiana ‘treasure-hunter’ Jones.
As a spectator, I found INDY! a spirited theatrical account of the first three films, perform’d at high voltage by a trio of three, two men & a woman? Well, I guess I did. Not so much for soul-moving drama, but more for the breathless way they went about switching things around—costumes & props—from scene to relentless scene, for 70 minutes of Olympic-level stagecraft. There were some funny bits, too, which felt more like drama-school improv than well-thought-out gag-hunting.
Watching INDY! as entertainment is one for the fans, but perhaps not for the enthusiasts. It was a bit like in the recent Napoleon film when they got details of the battle wrong—it’s just wrong! Perhaps the film is so embedded in my soul that anything outwith the purity of that classic will always jar. Not everything did—the book-burning bit by the Nazi in the spooky castle, where Harry Potter went into the flames, that was kinda cool. Oh, another good bit was when the mother of the sword-wielding assassin in Cairo who gets shot by Indiana Jones comes out complaining her son was only practicing his sword-dance moves.
So yeah, high’s & lows, but predominantly highs. There must have been loads of the aforemention’d fans, by the way, in the pretty teeming theatre, because the crowd energy was borderline riotous throughout. More pantomime than play, more comic book than culture, but genuinely true to it’s sacred subject & was somewhat a pleasure to watch.
Damo
