★★★★★
After 16 years at the fringe, you’d think Paul Vickers, aka Twonkey aka Twonketta, would’ve said and sung all they’d needed to! But the latest instalment of the franchise, is more of a catharsis than performance. Ready with Timothy Horsepiss, a distressed stuffed kitten squeaking incomprehensible monologues and Transylvanian Finger Fantasies, the usual staples of a Twonkey show are manifested inside a collective ambient nightmare.
Beneath the glittery eyeshadow and red dolly-shoes, something is different about this soft December night. There’s a melancholy and seriousness in his asides. Fans of Twonkey will delight in reprises of Goat Girl and The Magic of the Black Forest yet will be unprepared for moments of deep reflection.
The moment when Paul reads a short story he composed whilst in psychiatric care, mingled with deprecating comments, ‘if this was ever to be successful, heaven forbid’, hits with an honesty and vulnerability. He ends the show with the final lines from Anne Frank’s Diary “I keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would like to be, and what I could be, if…there weren’t any other people living in the world.” He treats the words with such reverence it sobers the audience.
Even the alternate dimension that Twonkey resides in can’t escape the anxieties of our age. His plaintive finale comes with the message to leave this giddy world alone. If what’s happening out there can pierce the joy of the fairground, things must be bad!
