Cabaret review: Twonkey’s Kingdom, The Hive (Venue 313), Edinburgh

By DAVID POLLOCK
Published on 06/08/2012 16:15

THE musical storytelling of Edinburgh-based maverick Paul Vickers is frankly an acquired taste, but amid the ramshackle – possibly deliberately so – delivery and an approach to narrative which can only be described as stream-of-consciousness, there’s furious invention at work.

Twonkey’s Kingdom - Free

Alternative Fringe 
@ The Hive (Venue 313)

Rating: ***

Only the first few minutes of the show proceed as billed, as Vickers introduces us to the puppet queen of his kingdom Twonkey, who’s “half-dragon, half-witch and an accountant”, before the rest veers off the road – again deliberately, although you wouldn’t know it from the bearded Vickers’s madcap gibbering and his mishaps with the assortment of knick-knacks which double as a set.

Each story is rounded off by a song, a gruff backing-track nursery rhyme propelled by Vickers’s naïve growl, like Tom Waits at a children’s party.

Among the Dadaist flights of fancy he embarks on are the tale of Humpty Dumpty’s orphaned children Dick and Darren, both members of a vicious species called roundbellies who live in windmills, and the time he acquired Lon Chaney’s imagination and book of flowers at auction. “This whole act is a triumph over disability, ladies and gentlemen,” he intones self-deprecatingly, and for a finale the BBC World Service tells us Hitler is dead.

• Until 26 August.