‘Writing about music,’ Frank Zappa famously said, ‘is like dancing about architecture.’ Well, there’s plenty of the latter in Let Slip’s perky Fringe debut: a goofy, spoofish critique of the Brutalist ideal that gradually caked Britain’s cities in concrete from the 1960s onwards.
Newlywed architects Roger and Wendy have a dream: ‘to create homes fit for heroes’; high-rise havens of 20th century living, purpose-built for convenience and community. It can’t last, of course. Ego kicks in and Roger’s buildings reach Icarus-like for the sky: monuments as opposed to homes.
This is JG Ballard via the Mighty Boosh, all couched in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Warped weirdos – all performed with admirable comic gusto – creep out of the concrete. But there’s also brainpower alongside the buffoonery, and Let Slip brilliantly skewer the empty lifestyle slogans imposed by aspirational consumerism (‘Regeneration for a new generation’).
It’s still a tad uneven and fragile, but Machines of Living shows real promise and marks Let Slip out as a young company with that rare thing: a distinctive voice.
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