The Stand
Aug 3-27 (15.35)

Material:  Delivery:  Laughs: 

Nick Revell is a master story teller who is able to keep his audience in suspense for his one hour show, Nick Revell vs Lily Evil Cat Queen of Earth Planet and the Laughing Fridge. The story is a surreal mix of sci-fi, technology-paranoia, pop-culture, geo-politics and a cat brought to life by Nick’s swan-flighted oratory. Last year Nick brought us his widely praised ‘Gluten Free Jesus,’ & since then has conjured up an entirely different subject & content from the bubbling factory that is his creative mind. In an earlier interview with The Mumble, Nick told us;

It’s in a similar style to last year’s show – a surreal and structured story which runs for the full hour. And audiences seem to be enjoying it. There’s plenty of jokes, but I don’t do any audience interaction, and very little improvisation. It’s about Artificial Intelligence and robots taking over and specifically about how I saved us from my cat becoming a ruthless global dictator. Entirely true, of course, but the events I describe were so traumatic that most of us seem to have wiped them from our memory.

The most interesting theme of the show to me was the technological aspects. The story involves the growth of artificial intelligence, to where AI could become smarter than humans and try to exterminate us. Nick tells us that his cellphone tracks his own bio-rhythms so it can play music for him in accordance with his mood. I thought this was a fictional spice added to the story but I had to google ‘cell phone sensing bio rhythms’and sure enough there is an app that does sense & analyze our bio-rhythms… if you feel a stomach ache, the app can sell that data to a pharmaceutical company and you might just find an advertisement for a stomach calming pill the next time you are surfing the internet. Then if you bought that pill, the pharmaceutical company would have more money to fund technologies which sense our bio-rhythms and soon enough we could very possibly have a cat overlord.

Like the novel 1984 by George Orwell, which warned us about the dangers of the state gaining too much power over the people, within a wonderful story, Nick Revell vs Lily Evil Cat Queen of Earth Planet and the Laughing Fridge contains genuine warnings about the path we are heading down with technology. This show is not just a wacky title, it is an arena-seated, eye-opening mine of information through which Nick is actually attempting to save the world, while having a darn good laugh along the way.

Reviewer : Michael Beeson