STARBURST readers will know Mark from his previous show, The Best Man Show, which made it all the way to Dropout.tv. That show was about a man having a nervous breakdown during a wedding and making as many of the guests uncomfortable as possible in the process. His new show, Out There, explores similar themes. We meet Larry, a man with their mid-life crisis in full swing. Larry decides to go out ‘into the wild’ to become a social media survival influencer. After all, it looks easy, and they’ve been out there before; how hard could it be?
Much like The Best Man Show, this new work uses audience participation in a fun sort of way. As you walk into the show, you get handed a bit of foliage or similar prop, and these are used to evoke the Alaskan forests that our foolish would-be Bear Grylls intends to venture out to. There are other props, but we won’t spoil it for you.
Vigeant uses the ‘social media’ angle to have a camera on him at all times. When he’s not on stage, we can see what he’s doing projected onto the stage, which allows the performer to caper about the venue, bothering ‘moose’ and ‘wild fowl’ and getting into shenanigans. The main gag is that the audience are the wilderness and that our survival mogul is, in fact, a complete idiot.
It’s silly, laugh-out-loud fun, and Vigeant becomes a living cartoon character of sorts. Simply superb.
Much of the central humour comes from the character slowly collapsing on stage. It’s masterfully done and laugh-out-loud funny, but appropriately poignant in places. Veering from outright slapstick to irony, this is a clownish take on an entire genre, using hubris as its main gag. Vigeant makes us care about Larry just enough for it to be funny, and the result is hilarious stuff.
Ultimately, Out There is a tale about someone desperate for exposure who gets what they want. This is a show about failure, and we sincerely hope that it will be a rousing success.
