Slick

Slick is produced by Vox Motus, a Glasgow based arts company which mingles theatre with visual exhibitionism such as multi-media, magic and puppetry. This year heralds their Fringe debut – a dark, comic tale of Glasgow urban life performed with strange, dwarfed dummies as the players.

The story concerns Malcolm Biggar and his oddball family, an impoverished group who strike oil in their bathroom pipes. Little Malky is bold and garrulous and wants little more than a happy family and a shiny red helmet for when he skateboards. The writing is at once universally amusing and shadowy, a testament to the vision of this new theatre group.

Any delight in the script, however, is eclipsed by the profoundly unusual technique with which the play is presented. Four actors serve as either hands, legs or faces to five characters, their bodies squashed with tiny tailoring the length of the actors’ outstretched arms. The set is contained within two black boxes which, when unfolded, fashion panoramic, intriguing cityscapes or malevolent interiors. Highly memorable is the villainous mouth of the evil Jerko Driek, the next door neighbour, framed in the highlighted corners of a skewed post box. The complete effect, often, is one of a surreal cartoonish smudge – Ren and Stimpy with a foot in the real. Slick is a highly polished, intensely visual example of fine Scottish theatre.