There’s a point towards the end of Chris Green’s seemingly interminable solo show when he confidently justifies his song choices when busking. “If I do it for me,” announces Green to the small first-night audience of Buskted, “it works for everybody”.

No. No, no, no, by no means.

It is wonderful if “there’s just part of [you] that has to sing”, particularly if you happen to sing in tune. It is admirable if you have the courage to quit your job after 30 years and support yourself by busking. It is utterly reprehensible to think that these two facts mean that you can charge audience members $16 ($14 concession) to come and listen to you recount your trajectory towards your busking career, interspersed with numbers from your homogenous repertoire and bad taste impersonations of the mentally ill.

I wanted to like Green’s show. I genuinely do think that making a decision to support yourself through performance after decades in a salaried job is courageous and laudable. But courage doesn’t merit the price of a Fringe ticket. Courage merits whatever someone chooses to put into your hat on Cuba Mall, based on how much they liked your song, your voice – how generous or miserly or inebriated they feel as they walk past. 

Among the many pompous pronouncements Green makes during the inter-song banter in his hour-long show is, “This is me, The Busker.” Great. Sure. A busker is not an actor, however. Yes, both perform. But the key difference between them lies in the agency of their audiences.

There are good buskers and bad buskers; there are also, more charitably, buskers who appeal to some passers by and not to others. And the busker’s audience has the prerogative to listen for as long as they want, and then leave. An audience in a theatre, on the other hand, is trapped, and if on closer inspection they don’t like the busker’s ware, there’s a painful 58 minutes of something that is neither concert nor drama to sit through before they can finally walk on by. 

I hated this show. I can say this because Green confesses that he “actually like[s] it when people are prepared to say what you’re doing is crap.” I thought the lack of variety in his song choices was boring, I thought his decision to read lines and lyrics off a laptop was lazy, I thought his charade of selecting his backing tracks on this laptop when they were clearly being cued by someone in the sound box was contrived, I thought his impersonations of the people he’d encountered in his busking career were amateur and occasionally offensive.  

His performance style is, as he says, “not everybody’s cup of tea.” I should in fairness point out that, while it most certainly wasn’t mine, his particular brand of teeth-staining musical liquid did seem to slip down easily with a number of other audience members, who chuckled at his jokes and sang along during his rendition of ‘Me and Mrs Jones’.

If what you’d like to spend your money on is an hour of crooning coupled with self-indulgent reminiscences and some unsubtle mimicry of Cuba Mall pedestrians, Buskted is the show for you.

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