Review – Backwards Anorak: Winter is Coming
Backwards Anorak is Karona… but are they referring to beer? Surely that would then be ‘Backwards Anoroc’ which is just confusing… Maybe it’s just a name… although surely it means something? Then again, maybe not. These are some of the things I found myself thinking about ‘Winter is Coming’, a comedy musical (loosely) themed around the popular HBO series ‘Game of Thrones’ (GOT).
This show is confused and it’s confusing. I was never sure if it was supposed to be a satire of GOT or whether it was a piss take of those trying to ride on the coattails of popular culture without coming up with anything original themselves. Certainly it’s themed around GOT, but the performers spend as much time talking about their roles in the musical as they do in character musical-ising famous scenes from the show. Think ‘chorus line’ crossed with GOT, but with lots of dry humping, swearing and gay jokes thrown in. Good comedy often feels improvised, an audience gets something highly tuned but feels like they’re getting something a bit spontaneous. This show is still finding its feet and so the performers rely instead on loose ideas of scenes and jokes that are anything but finely tuned, and all too often descend into the use of swearwords and sex jokes for a quick laugh. The problem is these laughs quickly die out without something to stimulate the mind. This is one of the pitfalls of not really trusting your material and instead hoping you’ll be able to improvise your way from scene to scene; the material ends up feeling a bit thin.
Not that there weren’t good moments, the singing from the entire cast was genuinely lovely and the energy was always high. The work of the ‘understudies’ was strong, Leo Miles in particular making the most of his opportunities. There’s some wonderful talent in this show, from all performers. Let’s just hope, in the not too distant future, they will figure out what Backwards Anorak means and then the audience won’t need to.
