Para Active, Zoo-oid Fright Night Experience

Review in Issue 16-3/4 | Autumn 2004

In Zoo-oid Fright Night Experience, Para Active perform their ethnicity with a welcome bucketload of trickster provocation and political suss. Boundaries between performance and audience space are blurred in the seat-free setting of the Caves as an MC in splendid jam-jar Golly make-up introduces a series of wrestling matches featuring his Zoo-oid specimens – freak show nightmare visions of ‘ethnic minorities'. These include Chemical K-All the Kathikali dancer, a burkah-clad Arab with a bomb disguised as a baby, a kung-fu kicking oriental babe, and an asylum seeker with fourteen family members needing housing. These are pitted against contestants such as Fat Yank McGringo, the Daily Mail and Geoff the Disabled Patrolman.

Audience participation rears its ugly head in the shape of the lapdancing Third World Kidnap Fetish which wonderfully parodies the decadent luxury of consumer-society S&M versus real-life bondage and torture. This is a show that not only gives liberal political correctness the good kicking it deserves but also proves that political theatre does not have to be worthy and humourless.

With a DJ on the decks, zippy cartoon comedy action and a host of colourful characters, Zoo-oid Fright Night Experience would work brilliantly outside of regular theatre venues – I'd love to see it touring the clubs and pubs of Middle England (wherever that might be).

Presenting Artists
Presenting Festival
Presenting Venue
Date Seen
  1. Aug 2004

This article in the magazine

Issue 16-3/4
p. 24