Performance: Atrocities

Silo Theatre

Review: Susan Budd

Sugar&Spice, aka Jonathan Brugh and Jason Hoyte, are gloriously, appallingly funny. They prod sacred cows until they bleed and push boundaries until they creak with metal fatigue. And to whiz metaphors in a blender, they teeter on a high wire without ever quite falling off.

Atrocities is George Orwell's 1984 brought up to 2001 and an exploration of what it is to be a man. It is also the first play Sugar&Spice has produced and it is original, imaginatively obscene and right off the wall.

Jon and Jas are brothers, a comedy duo kidnapped before a performance at Christchurch's Court Theatre 2 and incarcerated in a dungeon, where they are tormented by an invisible Big Brother figure, O'Brien.

Stuart Devenie's inimitable tones, ranging from sepulchral to simple irritation, advise that they are to be "adjusted" from creative outcasts to the uptight norm.

The process involves torture with electric shocks and comprehensive flashbacks to their ghastly boarding school days when simple, poetic, debagged Jon is tormented and worse by rugby jocks and headmaster alike.

It should not be funny, but it is outrageously so.

Jas' courtship of his unpronounceable love, played with winsome charm by Brugh, is amazing as they leap through more sexual positions than ever were documented in the Karma Sutra. Births and break-up follow in quick succession; their mime is fantastic - clear, economical and beautifully observed.

Their porcine father's fishing encounter with a sexually liberated Australian is marvellous comedy, as entrenched male attitudes are tested, momentarily teeter and are finally confirmed. The earnest, "It is not about being gay or computers," raises almost the biggest laugh of the night.

That cannot be revealed, but it pulls the guys out of what seems a black hole as the show almost judders to a halt. They flirt with danger, but the payoff is hysterical. In a kamikaze flight, Hoyte performs a seriously unfunny stand-up routine and recovers even from that.

They must have been hell to direct, but Oliver Driver has managed the task with flair.