Edinburgh 2013: Blam! is set to be the Fringe's unexpected hit of the summer
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Your support makes all the difference.At the end of Blam! the audience catapulted themselves to their feet as one and applauded wildly in a riotous standing ovation. Every festival has one totally unexpected hit and at Edinburgh 2013 it is Blam!.
On paper it sounds the most unlikely of candidates. Blam! is a four-man company of comic mimes from Denmark whose show takes place against the most mundane of backdrops. The set is an office, complete with computer terminals, desks and swivel chairs, printer, water-cooler and those low screens designed to give the barest modicum of privacy to the modern open plan office. Their props are staplers, post-it notes, document folders, wastepaper baskets and plastic coffee cups.
Yet out of this quotidian ordinariness these four comic geniuses conjure a world of dark fantasy which explodes across the stage in wild fluttering fancies as the confined imaginations of the bounden male office workers are unleashed. But Kristján Ingimarsson, Lars Gregersen, Didier Oberele and Joen Højerslev are not just compleat clowns they are gymnasts and acrobats of extraordinary virtuosity. This is a masterclass in movement which bursts the banal bondage of office life combining Hollywood horror, computer shoot ’em-up, glittering glamrock and heavy metal extravagance as the Predator, Wolverine, the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man stalk the stage which shifts through 90 degrees, turning as wildly as the expectations of the audience.
After such an eye-popping orgy of athletic physical impossibility, to the boom of AC/DC and Black Sabbath, a standing ovation was the very least an audience could do.
Blam! will transfer to the Peacock Theatre, London in October
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