Smashing Enterprises Inc (Greater Manchester Fringe Festival)

Smashing Enterprises Inc is a promising, if brief opening production for this year’s Greater Manchester Fringe Festival.

Mr. Croft (Steve Cain) offers an unusual therapy service. Customers visit his shop and relieve their tensions by smashing china ornaments. But times are hard and he has to ration the number of items that can be broken and, to convince a visiting bank manager that his shop is viable, trick his few clients into remaining on the premises.

Fringe theatre is flexible and adaptive but its limitations work against much of Rebecca Mickler-Platt’s play. You just know the budget isn’t going to stretch to any of the crockery being broken. More significantly the physical comedy in the play does not work as the intimacy of the venue makes the movements of the cast seem stiff and unconvincing.

It takes awhile for the comedic nature of the play to become apparent and even when it does the humour is understated. The play really needs to be more extreme even silly to put the audience at ease with laughing at the concept. The examples offered by Mickler Platt – the ludicrous idea of a health and safety warning in a shop where breakages are the norm and the banning of the phrase bull in a china shop- are fine but there just aren’t enough of them to sustain the humour.

The characters in the play are stereotypical – Eric (Graham Atkin) is unassertive, Emily (Suzanne Fulton) is aggressive and Warren (Alexis Platt) is, well, he is a catalyst. The cast do well with such slender characters. Atkin and Fulton in particular manage to flesh out their roles and add a charming tentative flirting.

Throughout the show, however, you’re thinking that it feels more like a comedy sketch than a full-length play and this turns out to be correct- it runs for just half an hour.

Smashing Enterprises Inc is a promising play but would benefit from reducing the physical comedy and concentrating on developing the pleasantly silly concept. Staging the play as part of a double bill would also offer better value for money.

Smashing Enterprises Inc continues at the Kings Arms until the 2 July.