Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

From Noises Off to Nicholas Craig, Withnail & I to Waiting For Guffman, actors spoofing themselves has often proved a rich seam for narrative comedy. 

Into this genre arrives Baloney Theatre’s Woodrow Auditions Live, a one-(wo)man curio in which Marissa Landy writes and stars as the eponymous ‘Woody’, a cheerily irrepressible 78-year-old thespian manqué, convinced he’s got the skills to nail any audition, despite mounting rejections and evidence to the contrary.

Completely disappearing into the grey-wigged but sprightly buffer, Landy is weirdly magnetic as Woodrow, his almost unshakeable self-confidence and vitality compelling the audience to interact with him when he asks. The notion of this being a drag act is never once raised, which is unsurprising, given that we don’t get even the tiniest sense of Woodrow’s motivations.

Has he found amateur dramatics in retirement or been striving to land a big break all his life? Has he ever had a wife or family? Pottering around at home at night following his latest setback, he carries the hint of a committed bachelor feeling the merest flicker of self-doubt. Yet to remark upon it credits the production with greater interest in the struggling artist’s psyche than it has. Woodrow seems oblivious to the passing of time and absolutely indefatigable, committed to auditioning for evermore.

In the main, you sense this is because Landy is having a lot of fun with the character, a comic vessel for her to show off her appreciable all-singing and dancing skills in a silly fake moustache and spectacles. A scenario in which Woodrow gets to play Santa Claus is all his Christmases come at once. Backstory and subtext be damned, the energetic performance’s the thing.

But what’s also striking is how Woodrow consistently reinterprets the brief he’s given or has mislaid, putting his own idiosyncratic spin on the wildly varied, already eccentric castings. Without a sense of conflict or great disruption, he simply breezes in and starts directing himself, as well as audience members on occasion, completely absorbed in the world he’s created. When a rejection is delivered unseen but firmly from the tech booth, it startles somewhat as you’d forgotten that this, rather than a mini-playlet existing independently, is the setup.

Woodrow’s little jests are shallow, ingratiating and tend towards the hoary, as befits the character. And yet a few isolated, blurted swearwords are well judged and deliver a brief jolt to proceedings. The songs are what make the show though, a silly bit of tight razzle-dazzle from a committed crooner and hoofer, the incongruity of a pensioner strutting and spryly jerking about the abiding gag.

At a certain point and for no obvious reason beyond the fast-approaching end of the play, the audience is implicitly aligned with the casting process, and we’re asked to pass judgment on whether Woodrow has proved himself. A canny way to go out on a high, it’s a foregone conclusion for this brief but diverting showcase of lightweight daftness that he’s acclaimed.

Review date: 15 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: C ARTS | C venues | C aurora,