zazU Part 3: Raisins to stay Alive

As already mentioned I was unavailable to attend the viewing of zazU Part 2 (but Rob's assistance has ensured that there is a full set of zazU reviews on this website). Despite missing the middle chapter I happily delved into the grand finale. I had been informed that food had been given to the audience in zazU 2 and hoped that this theme would be repeated in part 3, hence I deliberately had only a light supper before the show.

In terms of quantities of food on stage I cannot complain. Starting with the raisins in the title we moved on to characters disappearing in a cloud of popcorn, to BBQed sausages and chicken dancing before us, to breast milk being handed up and the highlight, an orange, which stole the scenes. There is even a cooked lobster (clearly cooked as seen by the bright red claws), who chatted and composes songs. The one thing I feel is safe to say about zazU, the cast (and indeed the stage in terms of the amounts of food scattered onto it) is very well fed. To my disappointment the audience did not receive much of this sustenance during this show. My hopes were raised when one of the interval acts included a jelly eating scene, but sadly I was not the chosen one out of the audience who got to partake in the eating.

However getting past the disappointment of my stomach not being fed, the standard of the show was, like the first, very high. It did have significantly greater consistency to its plot then the opening show, which I didn’t think particularly added to the experience. My criticism would be that a little more insanity would not have gone amiss, zazU is not about the logical interlocking plot which this show had and as such I do not feel it reached the heady heights of the opening show (incidentally Rob who attended this show with me agreed that this finale was probably the weakest of the three).

But the weakest zazU play is still an absolute bucket of laughs, a line up of mermaids and the aforementioned cooked, composing crustacean gave us all great joy, as did an array of mad scientists one with a particular fondness for magnets. There was also a rabid monkey who could be summoned with the click of a finger. He was a grumpy monkey but as he pointed out in one day he had got rabies, lost his best friend and the world was coming to an end so I felt his sour mood was rather justified.

Audience participation was well done from baby holding, to jelly eating, to helping someone give every task ticked off their fucket list. There was a dizzy array of exciting props as always including a finger gun (not perhaps an intentional prop for the show, but it worked tremendously well), and a great selection of the surreal and ridiculous topped off with a hearty dose of genocide. Certainly it was a night to remember.

All in all it is a superb, witty trilogy with strong continuous themes of language and culture and a variety of fascinating cretins. I greatly regret missing part 2 and hope I may catch it some day. If you can catch just one show of this bunch go for it but I think you would be wise to try and attend all three. We all need more cackling insanity of this nature in our lives.