KINGS OF THE ROAD. To 24 August.

Edinburgh - Fringe

KINGS OF THE ROAD
by Brian McAvera

Pleasance Dome 2 To 25 August 2003 except 12th
7.20pm
Runs 1hr No interval

TICKETS: 0131 556 6550
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 August

On the buses with jokes, tales and reflections. Hardly pure comedy but with the flavour of real-life.After his success with monologues for Pablo Picasso's varied girlfriends three years ago, Brian McAvera turns to some males of the species, living considerably less in the spotlight or the sun.

Billed under the Fringe's Comedy programme, this starts by a bedside, a son talking to his whole-body bandaged da. Ed Byrne's Rinty is the only one out of this piece's trio to be truly alive. He's visited, through mobile 'phone then corporeal presence, by his dead grandad, before dad, resurrected to a de-mummified consciousness, joins in.

The Sharvins are 3 generations of bus drivers, as wedded to the job - and as opposed to their respective sons going into it - as any genealogy of pitmen might be. There are one-liners, but also more reflective and ultimately tragic tales to tell.

If McAvera has collected these from actual men behind the big wheel, then he's created the sort of material Peter Cheeseman and co. used to serve up in the sixties and seventies for audiences at the Potteries' Victoria Theatre.

It comes over as a latter-day appendage to that period's fashion for documentary theatre, scripts hewn from taped interviews with people talking about their lives. A kind of 'Hold Very Tight' in the manner of Close the Coalhouse Door.

Ed Byrne and Michael Smiley bring their different generations to life. And there's a beautifully relaxed authority to James Ellis's Shiny - he kept his footwear so bright he could stand by any woman and check out her underwear - if she had any. The world was like that then.

Andy Jordan varies the memories and stories with some physically active moments of movement and dance. But it's the script that makes the hour. There'll be a lot smarter, up-tothe-minute Comedy on Edinburgh's Fringe this year, but little's likely to rival this piece for truth to a way of life.

Like the finally revealed reason why anybody would do the job, summed up in a gift from one grateful passenger.

Rinty Sharvin: Ed Byrne
Shiny Sharvin: James Ellis
TJ Sharvin: Michael Smiley

Director: Chris Parr
Designer: Jaimie Todd
Lighting: Chris Corner
composer: Tot Taylor
Choreographer: Keith O' Brien
Voicve coach: Majella Hurley
Assistant director: Ruth Wells

Sponsor: Agnew, Andress, Higgins Solicitors (Belfast)

2003-08-05 12:32:33