Storming Stuff!: Steve Hughes at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Review of Steve Hughes' "Storm

Lanky bearded Aussie, Steve Hughes, leaves his audience in the dark for several minutes. A soundtrack featuring the noises of battle, clips from Churchill's WW2 speeches and Nazis "heil-ing Hitler is gradually infused with more up-to-date elements, most notably the sound of US children pledging allegiance to the flag. The import is clear. When Steve appears at last, he lowers our raised guard by asking, "Are there any English/Irish/Scottish/German¦ people here? before gently lampooning various nationalities' characteristics, such as the Brits' insatiable appetite for documentaries on Nazis and sharks. An astute observer and talented mimic, Hughes engagingly delivers this fairly standard comic material, the calm before the eponymous storm. He hots it up slightly, while still keeping his audience on-side, when he attacks white Australian "culture, notably its racism, hypocrisy and (he claims) lack of interest in anything other than sport. Steve informs us that as a Goth heavy-metal fan and the son of an Englishman, he always felt out of place in his homeland, and drawn to Europe.

Gentle warm-up over and time to take the gloves off, Hughes goes on to paint a convincing but shocking picture of what "our corporate-slave governments are doing in the name of freedom and the "war on terror, somehow managing to make it funny ” an amazing feat. I cannot claim to have the proper critical distance here, as I have written about it myself, but I could tell that disturbing truths registered in the audience as he masterfully daubed the canvas of their minds with strident and compelling images. Once in full eloquent and passionate flow, Steve could not bring himself to stop in time and his show overran by a few minutes. If that "free extra opened the eyes of one more person to the hideous and hypocritical cruelty and rapacity of our rulers and their New World Order then it would have been more than worth his effort.

If I have one criticism, it is that he was just slightly too vulgar in his demolition of arch-demon Condoleezza Rice. I understand what he was trying to say, that any amount of shock and offence he causes is as nothing compared to what the neo-conservative war criminals are up to, but Hughes is well capable of making such points without resorting to such language.

In summary, "Storm is a pyrotechnic exposition of the parallels between Orwell's "1984 and Bush and Blair's 2006. The title is an apt warning of its intensity.

Two footnotes:

(1) Hughes' message is exactly that of Alasdair Gray's new play "Goodbye Jimmy given a brilliant rehearsed read-through at the Thirsty Lunch event on Sunday 13 August ( http://www.deliberatelythirsty.co.uk/pages/thirstylunch/tblunch.html ).

(2) If Hughes is as passionate and committed as he appears to be then he could do worse than hook up with the Bird Flu Diaries crew ( http://www.abctales.com/story/cellarscene/the-bird-flu-diaries-a-brillia... ). Sarah Solemani and Olivia Poulet are clearly on the same side politically but with a very different approach. Perhaps I am naïve, but I think a Hughes-Solemani-Poulet-Gray partnership could deliver a knock-out blow to the current world order. If any of them cares to contact me, I have an idea for a new project.