It’s All Greek To Me (Greater Manchester Fringe Festival)

Venue: Studio
Where: Salford

Seeking a new winning formula the producers of Shite TV drop the legendary Gods from Mount Olympus into a variety of reality TV shows. It’s All Greek to Me is devised and performed  -with both enthusiasm and talent – by Rejected Theatre – a group of Salford University Graduates.
 
The cast use established comedy techniques to great effect. There is an ongoing conversation in which one person interrupts another with an innocent word that, in the context, sounds dirty. The legends are plundered for laughs. Narcissus embarrasses himself in the mirror section at Ikea. Echo repeats everything she hears. Surprisingly this doesn’t get annoying and leads to an excellent punchline. A candidate for a talent show auditions with a song dedicated to Icarus – “He Believed He Could Fly.”

But eventually the techniques dry up and the cast fall back on spoofing the reality TV genre. They do it with style; the mimed manufactured ecstasy of the winners being particularly good. But you can’t help feel the cast have made it a bit easy on themselves .It isn’t much of a challenge to take the Mickey out of something that is, in itself, so close to parody anyway.

It’s All Greek to Me avoids the horror of ‘ It’s a Student Revue Get Me Out of Here’. But the limited targets set by the cast means that it is a show of promise rather than achievement.

– Dave Cunningham