Clowning is about vulnerability. Hyper-masculinity is about invulnerability. What happens when the two come together? We’ve seen it happen before, notably in Natalie Palamides’s Nate, in which the LA performer cross-dressed as a beer-chugging douchebag daredevilling a mini motorbike across the stage and getting into awkward sexual scrapes. There are echoes of that show in Furiozo: Man Looking for Trouble, which has been gathering acclaim across last year’s Edinburgh fringe and again at Melbourne this spring, where it was a talk of the town. But in its address to masculinity, there’s one big difference from Nate – which is that Furiozo is a man, and a scary one at that.
Is fear compatible with comedy? It is – as anyone can testify who’s ever trembled in a front row under the gaze of a standup hunting down a butt for his jokes. But Furiozo (real name Piotr Sikora) takes things a bit further. The wordless show tells the story of a bullet-headed macho man going wild. He roars at the audience, he totes a gun, he breaks out of a jail cell and goes on a cocaine binge. You could cut slices out of the testosterone in the air.
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