Will Franken is an odd-bod. The American - Missouri-born, now a San Francisco resident - is a character comic and impressionist, but not in the way we understand a Rory Bremner or an Alistair McGowan. He “does” famous people, for sure, but these are fleeting impersonations in a wonderfully free-flowing affair that weaves swiftly between stories and builds an hour of increasingly absurdist humour.
Appearing on the set of God's Property, Arinze Kene's play about racial tensions in 1982 south London, which is performed in the same space earlier in the evening, Franken does some material about race. His targets aren't always obvious – is it white liberals, opportunist minorities, the truly oppressed, or all three? - but that gives an unsettling pleasure to much of his show. He dons a black head scarf and a look of horror to show what “the front page of the New York Times every third issue” looks like - just as you think you get the joke, Franken segues into another to make you think again.
Franken's impressions, good as they are, are brief
He races through a large number of sketches, assuming many voices and accents, acting out scenarios while using remarkably few props, poking fun at the banality of television advertising and American news reporters, and team talks given by football coaches boring on about the meaningless concept of their team giving more than 100 per cent. Some of these are obvious targets for parody, but thankfully Franken has an original take on them.
Franken's impressions, good as they are, are brief. Oprah Winfrey, Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves make an appearance, and there's a wickedly funny Jodie Foster. When he does a spot-on impersonation of Michael Caine (now a standard for comics, whether or not they are impressionists) in a conversation between him and a brainless Hollywood executive, the simple repetition of Caine's name in his trademark monotone becomes deliciously funny.
He has been compared to a one-man Monty Python show, and the breadth of Franken's subject matter in an hour - a playlet about Victorian prostitutes trying to outwit Jack the Ripper, sketches about child murder, businesses chasing the pink dollar (“Even lesbians have money. It's the same money you and I use”) and improper behaviour by academics towards their young charges are just a few – makes this a fair comparison.
Franken relies a little too much on the innate theatricality of Southern accents and there were times when a slower pace would have better served the material, but this is a neat satire on American culture and its po-faced pieties, whether they be liberal or conservative.
