Fool’s Paradise at The Yurt Review
By James Murphy
Award winning clown Britt Plummer’s new work, Fool’s Paradise was inspired by her former relationship with a fellow buffoon, Otto, but that is a love story like no other. It is not an ode to a person, but to an idea- a clown wedding- and, in some ways, a simpler time: pandemic lockdowns, where borders and visas no longer mattered if you were stuck on the right side of the wall, and where there was all the time in the world for sunny neighbourhood strolls, streaming Looney Tunes on your laptop and for imagining futures. Imagined futures, though, are a Fool’s Paradise.
When Britt Plummer enters the Yurt, the venue that she has programmed while wearing her non-Jester hat, she’s in a dressing gown; it’s the morning of her Fringe wedding, with squeezy bananas for confetti, and the audience is invited. The groom’s running late; there’s time to recap all that led to here. In perhaps a homage to Charlie Chaplin’s dancing cutlery, the Adelaide Fringe dance floor, where they met, is re-enacted using large (Otto) and small (Britt) disposable coffee cups, before Otto anthropomorphises into a mop and coat stand for the remainder of the show.
On opening night, the sight lines in the Yurt did not always allow for Plummer’s skilful mime was not visible from all vantage points at times, particularly when she was seated, which could be easily fixed. When standing, such as when kissing the Otto mannequin, Plummer never seemed silly; in her hands the mop smooch was wistful, touching, heartbreaking, as it was intended to be. With musical interludes, raunchy When Harry Met Sally coffee shop moments, and a scene that may do for hand sanitizer what Ghost did for pottery, Fool’s Paradise is a consistently funny, deeply personal, almost contemporaneous exploration of romance gone awry; partly, perhaps, because of insurmountable, once in a century obstacles but, also maybe just due to the mundane trifles that can take the gloss off any honeymoon: Lady and the Tramp candlelit al frescos morph into mouldy tinned spaghetti in the fridge as time passes without deliberate and conscious intervention by both partners.
Aside from a few improvements in sightlines, Fool’s Paradise has all the makings of another endearing hit like Plummer’s previous work, Chameleon, once it more precisely and explicitly nails down the show’s concluding takeaway: wisdom that is already there, in the show’s title and scenes.
Four stars
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