‘One banana, two banana, three / Is this the show you paid to see?” Well might Bill O’Neill ask. I’m not sure anyone thought they were paying to see this. From the realms of the wholly unexpected (albeit a mite more expected by those who’ve seen the work of O’Neill’s director, the in-yer-face clown Natalie Palamides) comes The Amazing Banana Brothers, this bizarro faux-circus act gone wrong by American import O’Neill.
A fresh-faced mischief-maker in a boiler suit with a malevolent leer, O’Neill plays both Kevin Calamity – who’ll slip on 1,000 banana peels, or your money back – and his brother and gopher, Joey. Think not so much sibling rivalry as sibling death spiral.
It’s one of those shows that lures you so inexorably and with such a sure touch into its twisted world, you barely register how far you’ve travelled from conventional comedy. Maybe at the start we’re in a recognisable place, where another hip American clown in the Dr Brown lineage is putting the frighteners on us with his audience-intimidating manner. This is moustachio’ed, macho-man-in-an-eyepatch Kevin Calamity, hyping up tonight’s attempt on the greatest banana pratfall of all, the Prestige Slip – before disappearing backstage to a different fate entirely. Step forward little bro Joey. Ruthlessly bullied and cuckolded by his alpha sibling, is this his moment, at last, to play top banana?
I say play, but it must feel like hard work to O’Neill, padded suit notwithstanding, who chucks himself repeatedly to the floor (it’s less slapstick, more slipstick) then has his nipples molested by salad tongs. By that stage, he’s re-enacting childhood traumas with the audience’s help and numerous out-of-nowhere visual gags – releasing the safety catch on his banana gun; sustaining facial injuries from an imaginary ball.
By its later stages, the show brings real psychological intensity (tongue-in-cheek or otherwise) to its conjuring with fraternal relations and thwarted dreams, as bruised and blasted O’Neill torch-songs, self-flagellates and dances macabre with his oppressor. It’s an achievement to put a thousand fruit-peel pratfalls in the shade, and a show for which fans of freak-out comedy are sure to go bananas.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August
