3

	theSpace on the Mile (venue website) Theatre 3-4, 6-11, 13-18, 20-25 Aug, 11:10am-12:10pm Reviewed by Will Howard
Recommended for age 14+ only.  Free and unticketed. No pre-booking required.

If the rumours are true, the only people that don’t find the film This is Spinal Tap hilarious are professional musicians, the general view being that it’s way too accurate to ever be considered funny. Everything that happens to the clueless metallers regularly occurs in the supposedly glamorous world of stadium-playing rock ’n’ roll. While Spinal Tap caters for that side of the music industry, The Ride of the Bluebottles casts an equally withering eye on the plight of the unsigned artist… and any member of a struggling band who happens to see it might spend most of it either wincing or howling with sympathetic laughter.

Make no mistake, this production is an awful lot of rather dark fun, tailor made for a fan of rock and roll (preferably the kind made in Britain in the 90’s). For a long time it’s quite happy to be just that: the story of four very large egos put in a very small room, and asked to get along. The Ride of the Bluebottles tells the story of – well – The Bluebottles, made up of Darryl, the egotistical lead singer, George, the “sensitive” lead guitarist, Syd, the psychotic bass player and Pete, the unflappable drummer.

Yes, they’re tropes that even the most casual student of rock history would call predictable, but it works. That success is pretty much entirely down to the dialogue and the acting; the former is sharp and very witty, and the latter is uniformly great. Ben Ostell’s unflappable drummer Pete is excellent, calmly reading the NME while his band-mates fight and accuse each other like EastEnders characters, before verbally hurling them back to earth with some scathing put downs.

The other actors might well be equally good, if only the script gave them equally good characters. But this is where the show falls somewhat flat. As I’ve mentioned, these are standard rock-band tropes that border on clichés, and some characters simply don’t evolve beyond that. Chief offender is George, whose overly sensitive, faux-punk pretension really does seem to be his only beat for the duration of the show. Kudos must still go to actor Ben Schwarz, who gives his all and manages to make him annoying only to the other characters – and not to the audience – with an excellent sense of comic timing and the ability to humanise a character that many couldn’t handle.

The other problem is the plot. There doesn’t really seem to be any plot until the third act, where the stakes suddenly get so dramatically high that I had a hard time accepting and believing it. Truth be told however, this doesn’t derail a show that focuses so much on the script and characters; and while there is little plot there is an abundance of story, with every character getting a side plot that perfectly complements their character. In all this is a good, entertaining play, with some killer lines and four excellent performances from its actors. It’s perfect for any discerning music fan looking for something to kill an hour with.