Bond! @ Zoo

Review by Leonie Walters | 09 Sep 2014

Gavin Robertson’s Bond! is dad humour at its finest. “No hydrogen peroxide? I guess I’ll dye another day!”

Apart from fantastically dreadful puns, Robertson’s James Bond-inspired piece offers a delectable range of physical comedy. It’s in no way sophisticated but, combined with various (live and recorded) sounds, Robertson’s gestures are embarrassingly hilarious as well as suitably crude for a play that parodies the smoothest operator ever known. You don’t know it yet, but you want to see this man decapitate a guard with his own hat, and then mime his blood-spouting aorta.

In order for Robertson to portray Bond, villains, a Bond girl, and other dwellers of the 007 universe effectively, they all have to be easily recognisable caricatures. Where the play gets clever is when Sir Ian Fleming himself enters the storyline, in a bid to erase his brain child from history. Its quality also appears in the clever use of the only props: three metal door frames. Robertson can transform them into showers, motorbikes and roads that shimmer in the rain as the setting for a dramatic car chase.

Parodying Bond takes no huge feat of the imagination, but Robertson’s play nevertheless manages to surprise and delight those who’ve accepted their uncool sense of humour.

Run ended http://www.gavinrobertson.com/bond/