Jordan Brookes: Fontanelle
Ed Fringe 24
-
Ed Fringe 24 -
Jordan Brookes’ Fontanelle takes its title from the soft bit on a babies head that eventually hardens up, Brookes reckons it’s lucky they do otherwise adults would be using them as impulsive suicide buttons whenever an inconvenience arises.
Despite taking up the space at the top of the poster, the fontanelle doesn’t feature as heavily as Brookes’ new obsession: The Titanic. Onstage he is wearing short blue shorts and a crisp white shirt, his trademark casio and a teeny-tiny captains hat that covers the spot his fontanelle once occupied. As Brookes sails towards the end of his thirties, he decided to do some stuff that normal people do, like go to the theatre on their own, or more specifically, go all the way to Southampton to watch Titanic The Musical on their own. According to Brookes it was utter shit and he thought he could do a much better job, which he tries to prove, sporadically and in increasingly elaborate ways throughout the hour.
The hour is absolutely magnificent, full of Brookes’ characteristic elasticity, and although his Titanic Musical is at the centre of it, he utilises this more as a vessel to play with his various ideas, only allowing us to see snippets of his musical masterpiece between winningly twisted tangents. It’s not clear how much of what Brookes says he actually thinks, skirting around the edges of being a bit too men's rights-y, it could be a sort of intensely tongue in cheek parody of the kind of middle-aged men who think men, in general, are getting a rough ride. Or, as Brookes says, he’s only saying what we want to hear: if we agree then it’s his earnest opinion and if we don’t, well then it was obviously a joke.
You can take what you want from the show, with ruminations on the tragedy to comedy timeline, dogs surviving the Titanic and struggling to complement male friends - it could be Brookes looking back and forward and into oblivion as he approaches forty or it could not be that at all. Whatever it is, it is very, very funny.
Jordan Brookes: Fontanelle is on at Pleasance Dome until the 25th August, tickets here.
FOUR STARS
