Sarah Kendell is delighted by Helen Keen's award-winning fringe offering.
The loveliest thing about fringe festivals is when you discover a truly great new act that, if there’s any justice in the world, is going to be huge in a few years. Granted, Helen Keen isn’t a complete unknown, which is one of the reasons why her Etcetera Theatre show caught my eye amongst this year’s Camden Fringe programme. Having reached the finals of the national Funny Women contest and the Hackney Empire New Act in the past few years, Keen no doubt has audience appeal, and her intriguing premise for an educational comedy show about rockets says one thing to me – Alex Horne. Luckily, the comparisons to one of my favourite comedians on the circuit aren’t unjustified – Keen has the same gift for warm and self-effacing audience interaction, the same adorably eccentric interests and has put the same remarkable level of effort into her multi-layered comedic lecture. Given some more exposure and a little higher budget, she could be giving Horne a run for his money sooner rather than later.
Keen immediately cuts quite an adorably frazzled figure onstage as she appears amongst her props of easels and tinfoil rockets, explaining that tube problems caused her to be slightly late for the gig. “There’s nothing like standing on a train platform at the time your show’s meant to be starting to really get you in the mood for talking about space,” she says. She recovers well from the stress though, and launches confidently into her introductory spiel, in which we learn that, despite her exceedingly posh accent, she’s in fact a postman’s daughter from Yorkshire. A selective mute as a child, Keen’s parents dragged her to endless speech therapy sessions and drama classes, resulting in her current Enid Blyton-esque tones. “Unfortunately, it just means people assume I can pay for things when I actually can’t,” she concedes. As we learn from an adorable shadow-puppet show that she puts on in a rocket-shaped theatre onstage with the help of her assistant-slash-university mate, Keen found solace from her silent childhood in all things space-related, an obsession that has continued to the present day.
The second part of Keen’s show – in the same vein as Horne’s brilliant Wordwatching – consists of a wonderfully entertaining history of space travel, delivered with all the confident creativity of that kid in school that always completely nailed the class presentation and left yours looking like poo. Hand-drawn charts and illustrations replace computerised aids because, as Keen explains, “I don’t have the money for Powerpoint”. But that just endears us to her all the more.
Keen also encourages just the right amount of audience interaction by assigning one half of the crowd to be Russia and the other the USA, and handing one representative from each side a Khrushchev and Kennedy mask respectively. She calls on the would-be Kennedy later in the show to deliver a section of the president’s famed space race speech, and as luck would have it, he’s American and the possessor of perhaps the best fake JFK accent I’ve ever heard. Another hilarious highlight occurs when she redraws for a ‘modern audience’ the cover of scientist Hermann Oberth’s Die Rakete zu den Planetenraeumen, a national bestseller in the 1930s when rocket science first became popular. In Keen's hands it becomes a sparkly Marian Keyes-style chick-lit novel.
A marvellous fusion of laughs and learning, It is Rocket Science! embodies all the best things about intellectual comedy. Smart without being elitist, and with just the right amounts of sincerity and sarcasm from its host, this should hopefully be the first of many delightful fringe offerings from the talented Keen.
Helen Keen: it is Rocket Science V2 will be in Edinburgh's Gilded Balloon Teviot from 12th-30th August at 1:15pm
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