The Mixing Room at Menier Chocolate Factory – until 18 December
Reviewed by Claire Roderick
4****
Harry Peacock and Dan Skinner bring their podcast characters to the stage in this hilariously unhinged show. The Mixing Room’s space is dressed like a shabby community centre, with props doubling as more exotic items as the play progresses while clever projections give a clear sense of the location of each character.
After meeting at a support group for recently divorced men, Brian (Simon Lipkin) and Roger (Dan Skinner) bond over their love of the movie Avatar and develop a very dysfunctional friendship. Dan is a sweet, naïve optimist who is walked over by everyone, and Brian is a total bastard who uses this to his advantage at every opportunity. Brian is off the grid, living in a student house and wrapped up in dodgy deals with dodgier people, while Dan is sleeping on an 82-year-old woman’s sofa, always hoping that he will see more of his son and reunite with Claire.
Keeping to the structure of the podcast, the story unfolds through phone messages the pair leave for each other – usually Brian talking Roger into his latest scheme and Roger’s upbeat apologies and explanations about what exactly went wrong. This could be dry and static in other hands, but Lipkin and Skinner’s brilliant characterisations are engaging and funny, with Lipkin making you want to slap Brian harder each time he speaks, and Skinner keeping Roger sympathetic and loveable as his situation worsens. Director David Babani keeps things moving smoothly and Peacock and Skinner’s writing is sharp and witty – broad at times, but never as offence as the title suggests – ramping up the pace as the second act gallops along without any weak scenes.
The pairs exploits take them from a poker game in an abattoir to a room full of poisonous snakes, to a ridiculous race against the clock in China. As the stakes rise, the situations they find themselves in get more and more bizarre, and the laughs come faster and get bigger. The only scene where the pair are talking in real time takes place in darkness, which is just as well considering what they are forced to do with bolt cutters.
Brian & Roger probably isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I haven’t laughed this much at the theatre for a very long time. A completely insane, hilarious show.