The Fix presents Toby and The Beta Males' Picnic at the Bull and Gate

The Fix presents Toby and The Beta Males' Picnic at the Bull and Gate

05 October, 2010
by: Evolmike

Mike heads down to the Bull and Gate to check out some of the circuit's hottest new sketch talent, as presented by The Fix.

In a climate of fragmented and disjointed ideas, it's so fulfilling to see grand, polished landscapes in comedy. The Beta Males' Picnic deliver the stage comedy equivalent of a progressive rock concept album, set in an isolated underground bunker in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. If they haven't already got you with the pitch, they will in the delivery.

There's a mad scientist, a psychotically maternal robot, a paralysed immortal zombie wife, an insomniac DJ and many more tales of human wreckage, strung together in an arching conspiracy story that leaves you begging for more. The imagination is left inflamed, you can really picture the bawdy visages and grotesque interiors painted by these four madmen. Part of you wants it to be made for TV right now, but part of you is already in love with what you're seeing in your head. Highly recommended for fans of the more visceral and macabre early work of The League of Gentlemen, even more recommended for those on whom any of the brooding subtleties therein were lost. This stuff hits you like a sledgehammer.

The dialogue is fast paced and theatrically bellowed, obviously subject to very shrewd directing. They ever so slightly overlap each line but never so much as to overstep one another's function. Every scene is barked with melodramatic gusto and bordering on the wacky, which would be over the top in any other setting but works perfectly for such a maudlin vision of an unsettlingly plausible future. This is everything comedy should be, creating artificial despair and teasing hysterical joy from it.

Reaching the same destination but through a beautifully contrasted path are Lizzy and Sarah Daykin, the sisters of Toby. Where the Beta Males fire off jokes like a tennis rally, this duo are masters in the art of suspended silence, and of the nuances that link the mutual imitation between art and reality. Sarah is the drama queen, with boundless energy for howling, posing and shape-throwing, and that classic actress-shit-eating grin broken only by the occasional bout of suicidal dementia. Lizzy is the long suffering and oft unsung stooge, with a mesmerizing expression of trapped innocence. Something about those big brown eyes can bring an audience to stunned silence and then crash it into warm laughter.

Lizzy is the voice of reason and a springboard to and from the tangents and false starts brought on by Sarah's increasingly erratic, attention-seeking behaviour. These are just their characters of course, making their sketches the results of characters within characters, allowing for some delightfully surreal and often rather sick scenes. Of course, I say these are just their characters but you can't help but wonder to what extent any of this is autobiographical. All the more bold if it is, all the more inventive if it isn't.

What an inspired decision to put these two acts together. Just when you think you've seen exactly how it should be done, you see a completely different way to show you exactly how it should be done, reminding you of the infinite spectrum of possibilities in between. Humbling and very, very entertaining.

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Evolmike