Losing It

• Lucy Ribchester
• 21 August 2017

This article is from 2017

Delightfully grotesque comedy loses its own momentum

There's a whiff of Roald Dahl's The Twits about Boris and Ingrid, two clowns created by Txema Perez and Lana Biba. They live in a house of skewed angles, smashed vegetables and whoopee cushion farts; his beard drips with the vodka he spills while trying to drink; she luxuriates over the mushy brown bits of a banana.

In the early parts of the show, Perez and Biba manage to wring much comedy from simple words and actions – a pleased grunt, the savouring of the word 'banana' – illustrative of their clowning talents for mining life's little pleasures and indignities. A nurse arrives – multi-instrumentalist Bird Radio – and a surreal roster of musical accompaniments to their daily tasks ensues.

But eking out comedy from character alone can only go so far. There is a loose thread about lost children and growing old, and the final shadow dance image of the couple in their youth is poignant, but the story doesn't have much grip beyond a simple plodding through of events. In addition, while Bird Radio is a versatile and talented musician, his delivery of spoken lines doesn't match up to the clown-trained Perez and Biba, which creates an odd comic imbalance. Boris and Ingrid would work well in any short segment – their vegetable puppet antics are bizarre and original, and Ingrid's tender version of the classic arm-in-raincoat partner dance is beautifully pulled off – but as a whole, Losing It seems to lose its own momentum.

ZOO, until 27 Aug, 8.25pm, £10–£12 (£8–£10).