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.
But wait – this is part of the London clown festival. You can’t just terrify us, we need tenderness too. If you want an hour of comic machismo, minimally interested in the heart behind the hardness, Adam Riches is your man. Sikora’s up to something different. Yes, he’s totally committed to his character, near-naked and growling at us in his silver-plated mouth-guard. But he offsets that with intermittent, knife-edge switches into clown-like gentleness. He’ll aggress you with a pistol – then drop the mimed weapon and give you a little hug. He’ll nick your handbag – but seeks your consent before rifling through it.
There’s another conspicuous consent moment, when Furiozo starts making out with his shop-window mannequin sweetheart. Do we want him to proceed, with the kissing, with the sex? Thumbs up, or thumbs down? Whereas Nate was engaged in questions of sexual ethics at the peak of the #MeToo moment, Sikora’s focus (I think) is in whether and how romantic love might break the hard shell, and the habits, of an inveterate tough guy. There’s a lovely throwaway running gag whereby he snarls at us whenever we “aww” a delicate moment. (How dare we treat this like a clown show?!) Furiozo doesn’t know how to deal with delicate moments. Vulnerability is weakness, and he doesn’t do weak.
Is that his fatal flaw, in a show that starts as clown-comedy and tends – in a hail of party-popper bullets – towards tragedy? Rather like Paulina Lenoir’s Puella Eterna, which I saw immediately beforehand, Man Looking for Trouble zooms out at the end to take a wide-angle view of the generational cycles that (in this case) doom Furiozo fils to the same life as his hooligan pere. That perspective elevates a good show to a very good one, well worth the hype. It’s about to embark on another Edinburgh fringe run: come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.
• Furiozo: Man Looking for Trouble is at Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh, 1-25 August
