Bill O’Neill: The Amazing Banana Brothers
Ed Fringe 2023
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Ed Fringe 2023 -
Bill O’Neill is delivering a masterclass in falling over banana peels every night in the Courtyard, as he brings to life two very different banana brothers. It is the older, bigoted, anti-woke and anti-PC one, named Kevin Calamity who welcomes us to the show - talking brashly to the audience, with eye patch and overalls on he explains their act: ‘1,000 banana slips in an hour or your money back’, unsurprisingly he’s spent a lot of his career giving out refunds.
Most of the hour is spent with the younger sibling Joey Insanity, a slighter figure than his blustering brother. Insanity wanted to learn the piano but Calamity forbade it, considering it a ‘gay’ pursuit and instead herding him into their shared calling of falling over banana skins on stage.
O’Neill, here directed by legendary LA clown Natalie Palamides, is a force to be reckoned with; effortlessly funny, he fucks with his audience in gleeful, clown fashion delivering what must be some of the best audience participation sequences up at the fringe as well as, and I think I’m safe in saying this, the most banana slips per hour of any show this year. As the banana slips go on (and on), O’Neill cleverly develops them from basic level banana-slips that you or I might have a stab at, to professional level banana-slips that are only to be attempted by the experts. It is a Herculean endeavour to attempt the coveted 1,000 slips, I’m not sure what the exact tally is but I am sure that O’Neill manages to imbue these characters with such pathos, and performs the slips with world-class physicalisation that this potentially repetitive trope becomes consistently hilarious, and never boring.
And simmering underneath the show is what I felt to be quite a profound meditation on male-fragility, the ‘piano is gay, we must slip on bananas ad infinitum’ proves to be a pretty compelling metaphor for the frankly tragic pursuit of alpha-maleness - it’s pointless, and you’ll probably hurt yourself.
Run to get tickets, but keep your eye out for banana peel.
Bill O’Neill: The Amazing Banana Brothers is on at Pleasance Courtyard - Beside on Aug 10-13, 15-27 - tickets available here.
FOUR STARS
Photo by Jonny Ruff.
