Hetty Hughes
Staff Writer
This week saw the Players’ Freshers’ Festival come to a end with a six day run of this year’s Co-op: ‘He Who is Without Synth, Part Two: Return of the Buck Futters’.
And what a finale.
Not to break with Co-op tradition, this year’s team of co-writers and directors, Cameron Macauley, Ricky McCormack, Erica Murray and Paul Testar, created a plot line that was so random, so weird and so confusing, that it actually made sense. Essentially, two rival bands fighting for the Christmas number one underwent time travel, fell in love, made a movie, fought zombies, met Mozart, seduced a dragon, and obtained a magic keyboard that was actually a machine gun. Did I understand why magic coal was involved? No. Could any of the Yorkshire miners mining the said magic coal do a Yorkshire accent? No. Did I burst into laughter inappropriately whenever “Rick Swagger” did a hip gyration? Yes. To be honest, as long as the good-member-of-the-evil-band “Barry” kept getting slapped in the face and rolling up the sleeves of his beige turtle neck, I didn’t care if the story line made sense. Or jumped countries. Or skipped a few hundred years.
The music was incredible: a cunning mix of a live band (Neil Pitzpatrick, Eoghan Quinn, Steven Murphy and Ciaran Doyle) and some stellar audio tracks. All the songs were original compositions, written on a variety of themes including: love, casual racism, Christmas, loving the eighties and sex with cowboys. The musical numbers were often accompanied by a cheeky dance routine (courtesy of choreographer Jennie Fennell) and various costume changes: three cowgirl outfits and a pair of cow skin chaps appeared in the second half for a lovely rendition of “Love is Stronger than Consent” before disappearing for the rest of the show. Oh, and the costumes by Issy D’Arcy Clarke in general were unbelievable; the woman made a full dragon costume complete with moving wings, tail and paper mache head for God’s sake!
In terms of stand out comedic performances, it’s hard to pick favourites: there were forty-four members of the cast! But I shall try: A weirdly attractive, in a just-stumbled-in-from-the-west-country sort of way, young character named Mahon, or Mundy or something similar (it was very hard to work out anyone’s name!), who frequently launched into spot lit monologues about the time he drowned kittens or killed rabbits or sniffed pritt stick once out in County Mayo was hilarious, as was the Ozzy Osbourne inspired member of the Buck Futters who couldn’t speak in anything other than a drug addled slur, Mother Maggie and her shoulder pads, DJ Ron and his lucky listeners and Mozart and his lederhosen-clad minions. Some of the cast were first years, some were visiting students, some just third years that had never done anything with Players before. It was clear that they all loved it, all committed to it and they should be proud because their show, was utterly entertaining.
