Anna Burnside reviews a ‘clever’ but ‘grating’ production with an impressive central performance.
There is no direct Scottish word for the Italian ‘Giullari’: the travelling players who went from medieval village to village, performing the news to peasants and farmers.
This does not stop Dario Fo expert Joseph Farrell from translating the wild biblical and rebellious text into a polyglot version of Scots and relocating it to some kind of Scotland.
The original is written in grammelot, a theatrical language that mixes dialects and different historical periods for dramatic effect. Farrell parries this into a script that mixes clamjamfry and crabbit with stooshie and schemie. Twas and am urnaes nestle side by side.
Clever, certainly. Grating, too, which is possibly the point.
This is also an extremely camp giullari, which jars in the heterosexual smutty bits.
But too much prodding makes a show like this fall to bits. Best to sit back and enjoy an extraordinary performance from Lawrence Boothman. He bounds onto the stage, pursued by the law, and barely pauses for breath until the polis track him down at the end.
He is an astonishing physical comedian, inhabiting the different stories told by the giullari, each one more outrageous and controversial than the one before.
Ben Standish’s direction flags a bit at the end, although Boothman does his absolute best to keep up the energy. Fo, who often performed Mistero Buffo himself, leaves some big shoes to fill, and Boothman gives it every gallus ounce he has.
Mistero Buffo performs at Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint until May 10, 2025. It then performs at The Gaiety in Ayr from May 15-17, 2025.
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