Fringe is the place to go completely wild with your show. Not everyone wants the clean cut, bring-your-gran-along shows that have a lovely song and a dance at the end. Sometimes, we want it to be raw, raunchy, and insane!
When I first saw "Pigs Fly Easy Ryan" on the Fringe website, I was immediately drawn to it. It seemed very reminiscent of the In-yer-face theatre movement and had won the Untapped Award. I have a small obsession with anything even vaguely In-yer-face, so this production was literally the show I was most excited to see at the fringe.
I was sadly disappointed.
The show opens with the two air hostesses welcoming us onto the plane. We quickly learn that they are pigs masquerading as flight attendants and that there is a very clear power dynamic and one-sided love between the characters. They remove their tails, snouts, and ears to become more humanlike and infiltrate the flight.
It quickly dissolves in to chaos, drug trips, and humping. The story gets a little hazy from here. We have plots that start but never seem to really unfold, leaving the audience a little bit bored and confused.
There was a moment in the show where we were handed cotton wool to make clouds and we were asked to hand pieces to the rest of the audience. When I turned around, I saw the audience looking genuinely fed up with the show. There was even a walk out prior to this moment.
That being said, the cloud piece was genuinely my favourite part of the show, as it was just a lovely moment of theatre and audience participation.
The show continues on and just becomes absurd with no real purpose, the cherry on the top being inflatable armbands in the style of the American flag in a play that has been entirely British, using British accents and making references to Jet 2 holidays, a joke that has become a little tired at this point.
The show seemed to me to be a mish-mash of the youthful destruction found in Enda Walsh's "Disco Pigs", mixed with monologues you'd expect in a Samuel Beckett play. It seemed to me to lack a clear voice of its own, trying to replicate the greats of absurdism and In-yer-face with no mark of its own.
It has a lot of good ideas, but it needs to find it's message. Absurdism doesn't need to be clear in its message, but it shouldn't be so convoluted with ideas that it leaves the audience lost. It should leave the audience with their own ideas on what was being discussed to produce further discussion. I have seen on their social media that it is meant to be a fetishisation of freedom, but this does not come across.
I feel like the staging could also do with some reworking, I missed a lot of what was going on because I couldn't see the actors. This was due to large portion of the action taking place on the floor. I also felt that the production relied a little too much on the raunchiness and nudity as it served no other purpose than to just be shocking.
I feel sad to be writing this review as I love the fringe, I love theatre, and I especially love absurdism. However, I can't recommend going to see this show I just simply didn't enjoy it.
☆☆
I hope you all find shows you enjoy, but most of all I hope you have a fantastic fringe!
Love,
Tony x