By Genevieve Dammery
You never really know what is happening in the basement of a Camden cafe at 9.30pm on a Friday…
There is something inherently exciting about a Fringe show that refuses to explain itself. PHAB, the latest offering from AB Drama, throws its audience into a world where Kafkaesque family dramas, audience participation and even a battle between Man and Shrimp can apparently coexist. Over the course of an hour, the production moves deliberately between the comic and the downright bizarre.
Rather than presenting a conventional narrative, PHAB is structured as an assortment of short pieces, each presenting its own strange universe. The result is deliberately disjointed, but that appears to be the point. The production invites its audience to abandon the expectation that everything must make sense and instead enjoy the imaginative possibilities of absurdist theatre.
The production plays with the boundary between performer and audience. Two of its pieces sees the audience in a choose your own adventure-style scenario, adding an element of unpredictability to evening. Not every experiment in a deliberately surreal production will land equally successfully. The very qualities that make PHAB distinctive (fragmented, non-conformity) still manage to leave some bewildered, but bewilderment is arguably part of the experience.
And then there is the shrimp.
A show willing to play out a surprisingly heartfelt dialogue between Man and Shrimp is clearly not interested in playing by conventional theatrical rules. PHAB instead embraces the freedom of Fringe theatre: strange ideas, short forms and an opportunity to take an audience somewhere they weren’t expecting to go.
For audiences willing to surrender to the absurd, PHAB offers an unconventional and playful theatrical experience. It may not always be interested in making sense, but perhaps that is what makes it interesting.
