One of the best things about seeing lots of theatre is that you get to see lots of theatre. One of the worst things about seeing lots of theatre is often you feel like you’ve seen it all before.

After seeing Wolfe Bowart in LaLaLuna in an Out of the Box Festival in Brisbane some years ago and his two-hander with Bill Robison The Schneedles a couple of years before that, I was really looking forward to Letters End. Wolfe is a physical comedian of the highest order: his physical prowess makes us laugh, his pained face makes us melancholy, and the beauty of his imaginative illusions make us gasp in wonder.

Sadly in Letters End this is not the case. I could not help but feel I’d seen too much of it before–done by both himself as well as countless magicians and/or physical clowns going back to time immemorial. (To begin with a cheap thumb tip trick was not the most auspicious of starts!)

That said, I must also be conscious of the fact that not everyone sees as much theatre as I do and this is particularly true of the audience the night I attended. When you are six years of age, the old jokes aren’t old. they’re still fresh, awe-inspiring and incredibly silly. Thus I am faced with conflicting emotions–am I reviewing this for myself as audience member or am I reviewing it to the majority of the theatregoers for whom a thumb light is still an unknown item?

Questions arise: do I review based on the show alone or based on the content of Wolfe’s other work? Perhaps it should be this show only, but it is very hard to see productions in isolation. LaLaLuna took me on a wondrous ride with images that remain to me to this day years later: the shoe with a neverending stream of sand inside it; the ping pong ball juggling (with hairdryers); his head caught inside the balloon & the glorious ways the image of the moon was used throughout). It was magical, absurd, beautiful and cohesive.

Letters’ End tries to tread a similar path. It incorporates many of the same skills and devices but doesn’t succeed in pulling them all together into a cohesive whole. Although it seems to have been touring for quite some time it still feels like the show doesn’t quite know where it sits. Most disappointingly is how many ideas seem to have been lifted directly from earlier work: handing of tissues and other props backwards and forwards between live-action and the filmed images; an almost identical shadow puppet routine and the mop dancing sequence seemed a direct descendant, if not an actual clone of the feather duster dancing sequence in LaLaLuna.

Clearly Wolfe has a repertoire of skills and motifs that he likes to re-use. These include shadow puppets, bubbles, object transformation and manipulation, digital media moments, especially interaction between live-action onstage and filmed multimedia images, clowning (obviously), slapstick, audience participation. All of which is not a bad thing, just so long as there is variety in the way it’s used.

The set is simple, rustic, handmade looking. A big solid glowing furnace, a wall, and a strange dangling chute. It is this last item which drives everything. The premise is that letters (or more accurately packages, but Packages End doesn’t have quite the same ring to it) are delivered mysteriously and for reasons unknown, to the clown. He might work in a dead letter office or it might be more absurd/surreal than that. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they subsequently trigger memories and reveries in him, taking him on a journey from teddy-bears and childhood, through to the love of his life and old age.

The eclectic mix of music ranging from klezmer, funk and French jazz through to Black Coffee by Peggy Lee smashing straight into Justin Timberlake Bringing Sexy Back before entering the dangerously soppy waters of All Out Of Love by Air Supply doesn’t help tie it together.

Despite attempting integration through the “letters as memories” theme, it still feels like a series of sketches or skits strung together. This is particularly evident when after a sizeable chunk of business in the middle of the play suddenly we are reminded of the chute’s existence as a new package drops to the floor. This is clunky structuring as for the last 20 minutes had been totally forgotten the device has been completely forgotten.

There are lots of silly visual gags (silly in a good way) like pouring champagne into the record player as if it’s petrol in a car, an oversized stork bringing a baby bundle of joy through to the thoroughly deranged toaster-bride and chicken-headed suit-man wedding.

Numerous sections stand out as delightful quirky or bizarre. Being forced to continually and repeatedly juggle by the music and getting increasingly annoyed by it is nice. The baby routine (delivered by the aforementioned stork) which culminates in a chute full of poop before it’s hurriedly flung offstage is another.
The repeated motif of the fly (to the strains of Flight of the Bumblebee) is a humorous lazzo, which develops into the audience interaction section: obligatory for every clown. This is where a reluctant three footer is dragged on stage to perform in the boy, the fly and the rock sequence. Another highlight … especially when the boy’s feet are stapled to the floor to stop him moving about. The pay off for this long scene is worth it. Talk about overkill in one’s desire to kill a fly.

Throughout the show there was tangible delight from the 4 to 7 year olds around me. Giggles, guffaws, whispers, laughter. Their parents too seemed to enjoy the show. Except the lady next to me whose kids kept asking “how did he do that?” I didn’t have the heart to tell her it involved something as mundane as a plank of wood and a guy out the back.

Overall I wasn’t thrilled, however, my opinion clearly didn’t matter, the kids loved it – and that’s okay by me.

His style reminds me very much of another great American clown, Gale LeJoye, who I saw when he toured in his one-man show Snowflake in the 97 Come Out Festival.
To quote Gandalf in Lord of the rings cheap conjurers tricks

Credits