So last night I felt I was a bit outside the demographic for some of the references from Joseph Moore and his 90s rap upbringing.  I guess tonight, I’m gonna feel a bit more at home with a couple of comedians a bit more around my age doing some classic sight gags and prop comedy.  Right? 

Uh.  I guess…

Vaughan King and Alan Mcelroy try to seize life and set out to tick a few achievements off their respective ‘Bucket Lists’ before they die.  Life is simply too short, so they’ve decided to share that with us and help us tick a few off our own by leaving a bucket in the foyer for us to throw our ideas into. 

Except it seems all anyone in the audience who actually knew the bucket was there in the first place wants is to have sex with All Blacks.  Or has a death wish.  

Ok, so the improvisation element has been dispensed with and both performers now have to rely on the sketch comedy that they’ve written to keep the hour sustained.

Whether this is intentional or not, I’m unsure, but it makes for a bit of an anarchic, shambolic mess by the end of the hour.

Prop comedy is best when it is manipulative or transformational.  Simply throwing around lots of Two Dollar Shop knick-knacks really isn’t going to take an audience anywhere, unless you have some interesting ideas and a structure on which to hang it.

King and Mcelroy don’t too seem concerned that the sketches are unconnected, the laughs are strained and the gags are old.  They just go for it as frantically as they can and try to pretend its all intentional.  

Sure, this isn’t ‘high-end theatre’ and there are a few somewhat funny moments and they connect with the audience well, but by the end of it they seem to have missed the point of the exercise and I feel I’m left a bit short-changed on the original idea of exploring the wishes, no matter how weird, of everyone in the room. 

Sound is way too loud for performers to be audible and the design of it is riddled with indulgent gags.  Lighting cues are applied with a sledgehammer and quite unfocused. 

I feel relieved to be leaving the theatre: a piece of smashed plastic guitar having narrowly missed my face during the finale of the show. 

Unpolished, unfocused, sloppy.  These two seasoned comedians should know how to put a show together better by now. I think a return to the drawing board is called for. Or an outside eye. 

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Billed as “interactive chaos that you’ll never regret”, One Bucket, Two Comedians is an odd mixture of absurdist and crass comedy. 

Opening the show in bad wigs – Vaughan King in frumpy drag; Alan McElroy in a strange outfit – they play cards, get physical and chase each other about, kicking a few randomly scattered buckets in the process … McElroy has a long and crumpled ‘bucket list’ and a bucket that was strategically-placed bucket in the foyer before contains ‘wish list’ items deposited by the audience.

It emerges they are a couple of washed up old comedians – way in the future – whose job now is to warm up clothes for various clients, delivered and dispatched via a chute up-stage centre. The second consignment is the dark suits they wear for the rest of the evening, and that’s that for that promisingly absurdist idea.  

What looks like a wheelie bin turns out to be a splendidly rigged-out ‘time machine’ which transmits them back to this very night at Bats Theatre so they can “put things right”, given their downward spiral began right here … I guess this means if they go down well tonight they’ll have redeemed themselves and if they don’t, they’ll have demonstrated why they become washed up.  

Betwixt and between the interactive stuff, random sketches are played out by the ‘Two Comedians’. Vaughan King has a well-focused moment masquerading as a psychic. But Alan McElroy brings the tone down early on with his “that’s what you call a mono-log” gag. Twice.  

I’m not sure any of the ideas plucked from the bucket are genuine, or whether such ‘bucket list offers’ as we might make would ever be conducive to improvised comedy. The desire to be shot from a canon certainly isn’t ‘real’, given the handy proximity of the required props, but it does allow for some enjoyable audience participation (thanks Craig).

In a sequence pumped up as a game show spectacle, one Evan gets to guess the contents of sandwiches. And Mike, also from the audience, is amusingly subjected to a lie detector test to fulfil someone’s apparent desire to “Get away with a crime”. 

Alex and Cherie happily role play a LARP fulfilling another presumably phony bucket list item: jousting. But the knight’s helmets made from buckets are well wrought. And the prize Alex wins sees his bag searched at Customs, which results in perhaps the best gag of the night. 

The ‘round the world with 15-odd hats and props’ is lots of fun too, seasoned as it is with equal opportunity cultural stereotyping. 

The early set up of McElroy wanting to be The Cookie Monster and King wanting to be a street musician from Harlem gets paid off as the musical finale – and if you thought you’d seen the last white actor in blackface somewhere around the middle of last century, think again.  

Over all, possibly because it is both under-developed and under-rehearsed, One Bucket, Two Comedians comes across as a hodgepodge of ‘hey, this’ll be funny’ ideas with no greater purpose and no real unifying theme despite the bucket motif, so ‘try hard’ is the term that springs to mind.

But given the actors and director (Ben Crowder) have impressive credentials, it may well hit its straps as the season progresses. I hope so.

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