Waiting for Alice

Two men under a tree are waiting for someone to arrive. Sound familiar? But these two are not tramps waiting in a wasteland for the never-arriving Godot. They are two rather corpulent individuals, called Dum and Dee for short, who are waiting for a little girl in a blue dress called Alice.

Mind you, she hasn't turned up for so long now that they might just as well be in Beckettland except that their level of boredom and petulance is somehow of a more rotund, English kind. So that when Dum refuses to speak to Dee any more, Dee makes his silent life unbearable by producing a whole string of silly rhymes, something Dum cannot resist.

As well as Alice's non-arrival there's also the problem of the outside; not the outside represented by their tree but the outside beyond the page. Temptation finally becomes too much for one of them and what Dum finds there changes their whole world.

I saw the splendidly curmudgeonly Phil Jupitus as Dee and the magnificently apoplectic Andre Vincent as Dum. They reverse roles at every alternate performance, for reasons that become clear as events unfold. This is a smart and very funny show that gets a lot of mileage out of the nature of books, of reading, of the power of words and of belief systems. It also has one of the cleverest endings on this year's Fringe. A delightful treat of a show.