Bladderwrack

I shall try to be sensible about Bladderwrack – as I suspect its creators were not.    So, I’ll try to make sense of it even though perhaps I am not intended to.  The program notes and the interview with co-writer Adam Browne are no help as both are in the same comic mode as the show itself.

Fourth wall?  Forget about it: there is no fourth wall.  Some sound effects and extra voices are created by two people in plain view up stage – plus Samuel Thomas-Holland who sings from the wings.  Signs are carried on, and off and discarded props are retrieved by an expressionless Harriet Turner-Browne, while the principals (David Tredinnick and Adam Browne) sit (mostly) on stools behind reading stands – and read their scripts (sometimes) as if this is (sometimes) a radio play from the olden days.

The show begins with two boastful, but apologetic clapped out vaudeville/variety performers – David Tredinnick in tuxedo, one eye blacked out, and Adam Browne tall in tailcoat – who will perhaps deign to favour us – not an ideal audience, obviously - with the tale of Bladderwrack.  After a costume change – in full view – the pair become pirates – Saucy Jack and Bagfoot.  They are trapped and have been for decades in the bilges of the ruined and sunken galleon Vivisectress. 

Much ornate and loquacious exposition ensues: how they got there, how they have to stay there, their air and food supplies, and their fears of invisible monsters, one in particular, who will prove monstrous and not invisible.  They drift – or rather chop and change – in and out of character.  Turner-Browne carries on a sign announcing the longest fart ever done on an Antipodean stage.  Then we hear it, and it is indeed long.  Another fellow, who does not look like Oscar Munro as per the program, stands and rattles some sheet metal to simulate thunder...

Tredinnick’s delivery – as a pirate or (suddenly) a ‘famous’ journalist in a fright wig telling us the story – is rich, fruity and clear throughout.  Browne, meanwhile, has lumbered himself with a ‘pirate’ accent (‘Aaargh, Jim’ – like Robert Newton in the movie of Treasure Island) which renders him often incomprehensible – so you wonder fitfully what you might be missing.   

Described quite accurately as a ‘comedy horror science-fiction pantomime pirate show, with bits of opera’, it does indeed feature all those elements – plus puppets – in various quantities and with various emphases that never quite mesh – but no mind.  As a whole – if it all adds up to a whole – we are reminded of Waiting for Godot meets The Goon Show – but sadly, I must say, without the bite or satirical punch of either.

As a believer in the idea that a show must stand on its own two feet, I’m afraid I did not buy Browne’s book, heavily advertised during the show.  It’s illustrated and amplified and is for sale in what passes for a foyer at the Explosives Factory. Perhaps it is illuminating.  Browne says it is.

Maybe the idea is to let Bladderwrack wash over us while we appreciate the characters’ bizarre and horrible situation, their comic accents and characterisations, the many learned references to antique pirate lore, the classics, wince-making puns and absurdist silliness. 

But at the end of the show, Tredinnick can be heard to mutter, ‘What does it all mean?’  Just like a serious Goon Show reflection à la Neddy Seegoon on the preceding nonsense before the music kicks in.  Bladderwrack is inventive and imaginative, but it’s too much a couple of blokes showing off in their own world, veering between the hilarious and the wearying surfeit of absurdity and jokes for their own sake.  I’m not sure of audience reaction.  Amused? Bemused? Puzzled? Affection for the actors?  I’d say all of these things.

Michael Brindley    

Photographer: Steven Mitchell Wright