Written for Culture Wars
If we’re being generous, The Flying Karamazov Brothers have got half a show. Towards the end, their juggling grows genuinely impressive and, on occasion, rather transfixing. Their best trick is to dupe their audience into forgetting the sheer tedium that preceded it. That’s closely followed by their marketing, which probably fooled your ass onto the seat in the first place.
Kilted and caught in mid-air, posing like rock-stars, as the posters display them, the four New Yorkers seem cavalier and careless. In actual fact, they have all the swagger of an IT department loosed for the office Christmas cabaret. Utterly incapable of showboating – without which any act claiming virtuosity will seem limp – instead, they goof and gurn. Only that mode is rather obviously not affected. Just as you need, at base, to trust the trapeze artist, no matter how precarious the feat is made it seem, clowns must let us see the man beneath the make-up. We need to know we’re laughing with, not at.
So, when the four put on tutus and trot around the stage or engage in spoof swordplay, it is frankly embarrassing. No one onstage seems comfortable and no one off it – bar a single Japanese tourist, presumably taken in by their crude stereotyping of her countrymen – was laughing.
Each half ends with a signature act. The first – 'The Challenge', in which Dmitri Karamazov (Paul Magid) juggles any three objects offered by the audience – is rather undermined since no one seems to have brought anything along. The teapot and whipping cream, though not the Pret jelly pot, were onstage before we turned up.
The second, a group routine involving so-called objects of terror, actually proves impressive in spite of their overhyping. Introducing each object, among them a cleaver, a bottle of Cava and an egg, individually through the show, only serves to make them seem a bit unambitious. You start to long for chainsaws, Ming vases and Rottweilers.
There are some nice moments of Stomp-like beat juggling and the odd sharp joke, but, for the most part, The Flying Karamazov Brothers is filler. Its attempts to mine juggling for something philosophical are as lame as they are vague. Most of all, however, the act just seems rather quiet and quaint, a relic from a bygone era that lacks real engagement or spectacle. They’d be great at a wedding, but on a West End stage, the Flying Karamazov Brothers are out of their depth.
Photograph: taken from TNT magazine
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