Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Paul Williams’ latest show is framed as a romantic quest, a found footage escapade rendered in technicolour and gorgeous pastels, taking in the boulevards of Paris and the sunlight of Los Angeles.

However, it is actually overtly and excessively dark – but he has fun pretending otherwise.

It’s there in the musically gifted Kiwi’s impassioned opening song, an expression of glorious optimism that now is his time to shine, as well as sharing his affection for his tech. And hey, if things don’t quite work out, no matter, because he’s got a back-up plan that will still make people sit up and take notice.

Set in the summer of 2022, when he was holidaying around continental Europe, the show takes its title from a vintage camera Williams bid for online, securing the purchase at considerable expense for someone best known for being second banana on the New Zealand version of Taskmaster.

Opening the camera, he finds an undeveloped roll of film, so he takes it to be processed, his guilt betrayed in a bumbling exchange with a coolly bemused Parisian photo lab employee.

Subsequently receiving the prints, he pieces together an eccentric profile of the person who sold him the camera based on her indistinct silhouette, deducing that she’s in California, then emailing her in order to reunite her with her snaps.

When she doesn’t respond, he decides to simply fly over there, ostensibly to extend his holiday by retracing her photographed steps around Hollywood.

But he’s fooling no one that he’s not developing an attraction towards the mysterious Amanda and to LA itself, a place where anything seems possible to judge by the social media fame acquired by a college acquaintance who emigrated there many years before.

So when Amanda belatedly responds and asks if he wants to meet up, the impending sense of a rom-com meet-cute is inevitable.

With amusingly rendered cinematic visuals and a relatively restrained three of Williams’ always beautifully sung tunes, Mamiya 7 has a photographic look and nostalgia for a bygone, more innocent era that the internet has forever now displaced.

But from his initial bit of audience manipulation and misdirection, to cyberstalking his college acquaintance and the sexual confusion he took from James Bond’s opening titles, Williams isn’t exactly casting himself as an unproblematic romantic lead.

Los Angeles has its film noir side too. And there’s something suspicious about all this ice-themed content that Disney is suddenly producing.

Ultimately, these sorts of narratives tend to benefit from greater subtlety and more artfully disguised reveals, like the bespoke Kinder Egg surprises that Williams invents.

And he might well have kept the darkness of the show restrained, and at a subtextual level, for much greater impact.

Instead, set pieces about terrorist atrocities and some other horrific tendencies of humanity feel incredibly poorly judged, taking you right out of the main plot and making you seriously question his intent.

Send up the cutesy tricksiness of stories pandering to male desires by all means. But don’t get so carried away that it feels like we’re jumping off into another show.

The pity of it is that generally, Williams has once again proved himself supremely adroit at blending disparate multimedia elements for a piece that’s got a globe-trotting, panoramic sweep but also some lovely little, painstakingly crafted details, delivering huge laughs on occasion.

Review date: 24 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Assembly Roxy