Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Why does the lamestream fake news media only tell us bad things about viruses? Edy Hurst is here with a reminder of the War Of The Worlds story where the pathogens were the good guys, defeating the Martian invaders who conquered the planet and wanted to subjugate all humans.

The musical comic is not the first to revisit HG Wells’s 1898 metaphor for colonialism, not by a long chalk, as his ridiculously long title acknowledges. Your reaction to the 184-character monstrosity is likely to be a good gauge of how you’ll respond to the show. Think of it as puerile and stupid, then you’ll probably best stroll on.

For this is a mad, noisy jumble of cheap props, even cheaper graphics and a few peculiar songs called into service for a slapdash retelling of the story. Why? ‘Because why write a joke?’ is his answer. So he barely does.

Instead, we get a hour of dumb, surreal set pieces, with so little at their heart, not even the insane depth of Hurst’s obsession, that it gets increasingly hard to connect to the superficial material. The plot of the novel is very simple when reduced as much as it is here, so we’re left with a series of mad scenes such as Hurst in a plaster-of-Paris space helmet barking out dictatorial proclamations to us puny Earthlings, but where the situation’s the joke, more than anything in the script

He throws himself into the show, that can’t be denied, and it’s more technically demanding than the surface shoddiness suggests. Although his failure to turn the voice modifier on and off when he switches between alien and human voices is a running joke.

There’s some fun audience participation when we try to repel the space invaders and some clunky satire when he suggests the planet will become luxurious Martian apartments. And that bloke who went on Question Time three years ago and couldn’t believe his £80,000 salary put him in the top five per cent of earners? He gets what’s coming to him, too.

Hurst’s enthusiasm goes some way to selling all this nonsense, but – like the title – it goes on too long.

• Edy Hurst’s Comedy Version of Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of HG Wells’ Literary Version (Via Orson Welles’ Radio Version and Steven Spielberg’s Film Version) of the War of the Worlds is at Just The Tonic at The Mash House at 10:40pm. Its last performance is tonight.

Review date: 23 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Just the Tonic at The Mash House