Review of Scene 2
Elizabeth has a visitor
By Our Man in the Bar, Steve Tomkins

The delights continue. Elizabeth was just over an hour late coming on for the scene at her house, which seems almost boringly slick beside Gabriel who finally strolled onto the stage a glorious 25 hours late for his cue. It's all in the timing, you know.

The stage manager who heroically understudied for Elizabeth then joined the various directors in some offstage wassailing. A number of people are clearly finding this experience bad for both their nerves and livers.

Things definitely picked up when we had two characters on the stage at once. In fact there were three, as in a bold move this adaptation of the nativity has a Fairy Godmother join Mary and Elizabeth for their "Chardonnay and Pride and Prej" girls' night in.

The most exciting feature continues to be Jesus' bladder-kicking Evil Twin. When a pizza delivery boy evidently left over from The Life of Brian arrives with a spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam and spam pizza for the pregnant ladies, Evil Twin says "Okay what moron ordered the spam? I don't want it here, so back up it goes!"

Then as things get increasingly alcoholic both on and offstage, she demands and gets vodka fed to her down a big honkin' amnio needle. (Thank the Lord we haven't all got webcams yet.) Watch out for plot developments between Evil Twin and Jesus – who seems to be rather quiet so far considering.

Elizabeth does her bit, taking Mary's news of parthenogenesis remarkably well, delivering a brief prophetic blessing with exorcist-like stare, and then settling down for a night of remarkably heavy drinking for expectant mothers, on the ground that the Surgeon General has not been invented yet. Mary stays there for a few nights while the gossip at home dies down.

Watch out for...

• the not-strictly-biblical Jedi Knight who turns up to fight evil, and heroically obtains a quantity of peppermint tea to mask the evil smells of regurgitated spam pizza.

• regurgitated spam pizza.

• sheep poo.

© Ship of Fools 2002