Character comedy can be a little bit tricky to get right at the best of times. Madeleine Rowe’s new show Knight Knight is a bit of surreal Arthurian fantasy nonsense, in which one idiot knight fails to become a legend.
And to be honest, Arthurian is pushing it a little too much. This is essentially a one-person character/clown show with incredibly vague ‘knight’ and ‘medieval’ themes. There’s a sword in a stone (well, audience member), and of course, there’s Camelot, which is indeed a silly place.
But most important of all, there’s a horse. Well, not an actual horse; this show is in a fairly small space, and an actual horse would be a health and safety nightmare. The horse is played by a very cute toy hobby horse. Anyway, the horse is terribly important, as it’s the main romantic character, and yes, that’s as silly as it sounds. This is not a show in which one takes the plot seriously.
This is mostly repetition, physical comedy and repetition. Much of the humour comes from putting on a silly accent, and though we all love a bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, all the cool kids have moved on to Horrible Histories. This is a very ‘American parody of medievalism’, combined with a very specific sort of slapstick. You will either be laughing uncontrollably or not at all.
Madeleine Rowe is a strong comic talent. This humour hits a very specific sort of slapstick, so if you like humour that gets silly quickly, stays there and then endlessly repeats the bit until you have to stop laughing in order to breathe, then this is for you.
You can book tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe show here and learn more about the artist here.



