MARK THOMAS: 100 ACTS OF MINOR DISSENT | LIVE REVIEW
Sherman Theatre, Wed 19 Mar
Mark Thomas comes on to the stage to the strains of Charles Mingus’ Haitian Fight Song, perhaps a nod to the combative nature of his performance. Thomas’s style lies somewhere between investigative journalism, performance art and stand-up, and he treats his audience to a show that is part Woodward and Bernstein, part Jeremy Beadle.
The show, 100 Minor Acts Of Dissent, is based around Thomas’s efforts to do, well, just that: 100 minor acts of dissent. If he succeeds he will recount all of them in a special one-off show later this year. If he fails he has to donate £1,000 to UKIP, “the political wing of Morrissey.”
Thomas has been in the business for nearly thirty years now, and it shows. You cannot be a performer that long without developing some impressive chops. While the content of the show sometimes threatens to spill over into right-on hectoring that does not stop Thomas from achieving doubling-over levels of laughter at various points. An abusive tirade directed at a persistent heckler includes an impressive level of profanity and has the audience in stitches.
This is a man who is clearly in love with the possibilities of theatre and performance. He adopts different accents and different characters for nearly every other sentence. Performance is a natural medium for him.
Throughout the show Thomas shows us selected minor acts of dissent that he has performed: Mark Thomas tries to get himself banned from every Tesco in Britain! Mark Thomas makes a calendar of police officers refusing to have their photos taken! Taking his cue from the internet-based campaign against Senator Rick Santorum (for God’s sake, don’t google it!), Mark Thomas proposes various new definitions for the name Farrage!
It is all very funny but despite the man of the people veneer there is also the sneaking suspicion that Mark Thomas is more interested in Mark Thomas than he is in improving the lot of the working person.
There’s much to enjoy here, and Thomas’s political stance certainly seems a lot more coherent than Russell Brand’s sixth-form musings about the unfairness of it all, but ultimately Thomas’s skill lies more in his ability to make audiences laugh than in presenting a coherent political platform.
words DAVID GRIFFITHS