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The Ballad of Badger Bickle's Youngfella The Ballad of Badger Bickle's Youngfella is an absurdist fantasy. It charts the tale of Bertie Bickle and his youth in a magical homeland which he is forced to flee for America when the whole town discovers that his mother has had an affair with the local upholsterer. The audience is swiftly transported through Bertie's life in America: the tragic death of his parents, his teenage years in an orphanage, his early adult life as a refuse collector on the streets of New York. Bertie has clown-like obsession with cakes, bedtime stories and, most importantly, a ceili dancer he remembers from his youth in Ireland. It is this image that eventually calls Bertie home. Blessed with the aid of a voice inside his head, Bertie has a divine talent for gambling, which soon provides him with the resources to return to Ireland to sweep up hair for a pittance in the local hairdressing salon, to fall in love with a married woman, to kill a man and to eat more cakes. What ensues is a clown-esque, unsentimental parody of traditional Irish theatre and film. The audience follows a seemingly vacant main character through a story that is as unpredictable as Bertie himself. For Bertie is essentially a clown figure with simple desires. When someone gets in the way of these desires, Bertie's truly frightening, dark side is revealed. The Ballad of Badger Bickle's Youngfella is a 90-minute theatre piece. It blends physical comedy, dance, clowning and story-telling and is performed by four actors. The four actors narrate the story while performing over 100 characters between them and is therefore minimalist in presentation and style. BYOB use story-telling and physicality as a means of presenting a cinematic-style narrative. Though the story-line is recognisably influenced by cinematic conventions, the devices used are essentially theatrical. Rapid scene changes are effected through narration, sound, lighting, stage props and physicality. The style of the piece is dominated by the performances of the actors. The interplay between narration and role-play gives the sense of live improvisation. The parodic take on traditional Irish story-telling reflects the influence of stand-up comedy on BYOB's performance style. BYOB reduces theatre to its most prime elements, emphasising the creative role of the performer above the trappings of stage decoration and scenography. The anarchic use of powerful story-telling, role-play, mask and clowning is designed to present theatre in it's barest, ancient and most ritualistic form. Previous productions by BYOB have drawn comparisons with a variety of comic practitioners like Flann O'Brien, Monty Python, Buster Keaton, Barabbas and Patrick McCabe. |
