Towards the end of last summer’s Edinburgh festival, tongues started wagging about Jon Pointing’s below-the-radar work-in-progress show in a graveyard shift on the free fringe. His spoof acting masterclass is back this year, developed to full length, transferred to the Pleasance Courtyard, and justifying the hype. Pointing masquerades as theatre guru Cayden Hunter – touchy-feely but thin-skinned, colossal of ego and microscopic in self-knowledge. He is the David Brent of the trust exercise and the improv game. Like Brent, Hunter at his best is so convincing you’d think his creator must be intimately familiar with his own inner prat. Or that, forced into contact with prats, he’s studied them (and his revenge on them) in minute detail.
In love with himself and patronising his audience, Hunter channels more bullshit than the sluice gates at a dairy farm. “There’s no maps for the kind of roads we’re travelling down,” he purrs. He is, in short, a creep – and yet (to Pointing’s credit) the text isn’t that improbable. Tweak the caricature down a notch, and this acting class – with its talk of risk and danger, its fetishising of “the truth”, poorly defined – is but an ace away from credible reality.
It doesn’t feel like an attack on theatre, however– more of a playful dig. Its real target is Hunter, not his artform – just as David Brent’s awfulness transcended the office environment. From the faux-consensuality of his every utterance (with an upward-inflection “yeah?” or “OK?” rounding off each sentence), via the sexy eyes he makes at a pupil in the second row, to his showy physical-theatre fluidity when performing excerpts of his own work, he is a mesmerisingly ghastly creation. Silly, too: the chair section (“Just a chair? You know what I see? I see a story!”) is deliciously daft.
For me, Pointing overplays his hand and strains credibility when Hunter starts performing his own (ludicrous) poetry. The unfolding of the character’s sad-sack hinterland is a little predictable, too,with echoes of the Perrier-winning Jackson’s Way, another faux-workshop with intimations of psychological collapse. Fortunately, it barely detracts from the wicked pleasure of this full fringe debut, which pricks the preciousness of many a drama workshop and propels a cringeworthy new comic monster preening into the world.
- At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Box office: 0131 226 0000.