Jacquelin Walters and Michael Watt in Let’s Not Turn On Each Other, Walters and Watt at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

Let’s Not Turn On Each Other (Stage 25, Spotlight Cabaret)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Now, here’s a theatrical welcome to warm the heart. An appealing pair of clowns, whose resting state is high excitement, are downright ecstatic when they catch sight of us.

Bethandreth and Cownow can scarcely believe their good fortune in having company. After all, they’ve been out in the wilderness by themselves for a long time — months maybe, or years or decades, “let’s just call today Friday” — waiting for a signal from “the prophet.” We gather they’re true-believer cultists on assignment, whose outpost location, they’re convinced, is a measure of their importance to “the guild.”

In this unusual new “musical play, a clown show with occasional music by and starring the team of Jacquelin Walters and Michael Watt, they have an original patter song about that. “Two special girls….”

Every day they wait, an appealingly wide-eyed and boisterous Vladimir and Estragon (Beckett goes camping, with guitar and ukulele?). The prophet has left them with a daily ritual, specific instructions for guild-approved virgin behaviour. These include a written manual: “wash your face,” a “daily stretch,”“look out for wolves,” “listen to a tape” from a scratchy collection that includes one devoted to seven hours of the prophet breathing.

The songs, inventively folk-ish in style, have a kind of ritual significance to the characters that is very unlike the usual infrastructure of musical theatre. They’re positioned at moments of crisis when Bethandreth and Cownow are in need of reassurance. “What do we do when we’re in trouble? We sing The Trouble Song,” they tell each other other. “Turbulence is the stream in which we travel….”

When an inadvertent revelation comes their way, they set forth from their wilderness home on a scrambly journey, with an unreadable map, through hill and dale and over the bar of the Spotlight Cabaret. And they sing themselves a touching little song, “did you know?”

We meet characters who are hopeful and distractible in the clown-ly way, bouncing back from their wounds. The performances from Walters and Watt are big and bold, with southern accents that come and go. They virtually burst out of an inconclusive, open-ended story; first they’re followers, then they have to make their own choices, in tandem with nature. “We’re going to make love to Mother Nature.”

It’s an oddball, wistful little original, this one. I found it beyond my grasp, but in an appealing way.