Review: Wolf Meat, Wardrobe Theatre

The Wardrobe Theatre has arguably become the nucleus of Bristol’s fringe scene. Its insatiable appetite to showcase vivacious new productions has seen it move out of its tiny first home above the White Bear on St Michael’s Hill to a 100-seat venue in The Old Market Assembly.

The theatre’s strength is its mixture of touring and in-house productions of comedy, cabaret, new writing and puppetry. You never quite know what you’re going to get.

Enter the auditorium for Wildheart & Lyric’s Wolf Meat, though, and the evening’s tone is immediately set as you’re accosted by a manic moustachioed oddball and a couple of horny grandmas. Audience interaction is key throughout the play, and the result is a bawdy atmosphere with people shouting out, fetching drinks and filming on their phones.

The play begins with safety instructions delivered in character by the bearded weirdo (Wolfy). As it turns out, this the most genuinely comic part of the show. What follows is an uproarious and unrestrained hour of daftness. Gross-out gags come thick and fast: there a cacophony of granny-snogging, toxin-induced vomiting, laptop gyrating and a memorable incident of genital flailing.

Luckily, the game cast keep just enough control amid the feverish silliness to ensure that the jokes land well, eliciting plenty of genuine laughs along with the gasps and groans.

All entertaining enough. But there’s a sense of missed potential here. It’s as if Wolf Meat once aimed for something grotesque and intriguing – but came up with an X-rated pantomime. The ingredients for a fairytale reimagined are here – in bad-ass and sexed-up versions of a grandmother, a wolf, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella. But these folklore references are rudimentary and under-explored.

Then there’s the portrait of Grandma wearing her “Miss Croyden 1938” sash in a grimy flat evocative of the East End gothic of a Philip Ridley play. But Grandma only gives the briefest allusion to her background, hopes and disappointments.

What saves Wolf Meat from being the stuff of a high-spirited student production is its meta-theatrical knowingness, reminding us that the company knows what it’s doing and the whole thing is essentially a middle finger to the conventions of ‘quality’ theatre. One high point is when Wolfy turns around a chair to reveal a browning sunflower taped to its back, and tells the audience: “We’re in the park now”.

The four Wildheart and Lyric performers (Mella Faye Punchard, Oliver Harrison, Carla Espinoza, Katie Grace Cooper) are commanding and energetic – and deftly handle a slightly raucous audience. Carla Espinoza (pictured top with Harrison) as Luna is given the gift of her character being almost mute at the play’s beginning, in contrast to all the shouting by other characters. The result is a magnetic performance – all big-eyed, staring and strange – on which the play hinges.

Despite Wolf Meat’s potential, though, as it is there’s not enough to get your teeth into. 

Wolf Meat was at the Wardrobe Theatre on Friday, February 24 and Saturday, February 25. The Wardrobe’s ever-adventurous programme is at thewardrobetheatre.com/#/whats-on/4585398933