Review by Steve Bennett

‘It’s quite weird and experimental and not everyone will get it,’ comes a warning at the start of Yeti’s Demon Dive Bar. But strangeness is not the problem here, more that all the surreal ideas seem half-formed, with no purpose or sense of the world we’re in.

Even the bar setting is mostly abandoned. It’s a framework in which different acts can appear without back story, but there’s no care as to what atmosphere fills the place, or any sort of through line worth following. The Yetis might look like refugees from Arctic Boosh, but her shenanigans seem a lot more futile than Barrett and Fielding’s creations.

Yes, there’s a lot of off-the-wall imagination gone into the look of characters such as the Twins conjoined by their monobrow, the angler fish, or the yetis themselves, made from mop heads. But Jennifer Byrne and Victoria Falconer-Pritchard – the duo also behind East End Cabaret – apparently exhausted themselves on creating the design. When it comes to fleshing out what they do with these creations, they seem to have settled on the first thing that came into their heads.

Byrne’s yeti, who has a grating, over-the-top cod Southern US accent for some reason, fits the predatory cabaret chanteuse boilerplate clambering into the audience and manhandling, or yetihandling, them. The audience’s alleged inner thoughts being broadcast is old hat, too – although you could at least see the purpose of that ‘bit’. The disembodied magician, Johnny ‘The Head’ Nobody is far more of a ‘huh?’ moment.

Since they are modern clowns we require some audience play. In this case trying to spit ping-pong balls into the wastepaper basket on the head of a four-armed man. It’s certainly a bit of fun, but doesn’t amount to much – except a tired joke about Thailand when the balls make their appearance. Musically, they are a lot tighter, and such interludes are highlights, even if titles like Funk You From Behind shows the limits of their comic imagination.

The pair are clearly enjoying larking about, and infectious though it is, it can’t sustain an hour. It’s quite a noisy show – lots of activity and shouting, but it has little coherence. And joking about the lack of slickness only goes so far, too.

For balance, some members of the audience, especially at the studenty end of the demographic, loved this, but these are a couple of yetis you don’t need to hunt down.

Review date: 22 Aug 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard