Bluff – Online

Bluff is available at bluffmusical.com.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

Nearly everybody lies in Bluff, a new audio musical with music and lyrics by Ed Zanders, so I may as well join in and say how pleasant a listen it is.

That’s only a partial lie, really. Zanders’ songs are lushly orchestrated by an eight-piece band, and sound suitably sumptuous. There’s also a fine level of craft audible in his lyrics: a definite sense of Sondheim-like attention to syllabic phrasing.

It is the presentation of the comedy which makes listening to Bluff such an arduous task. The story is set in a place called Paradise, where young Alec (Ryan Kopel) harbours an ambition to become head librarian, only to find that his childhood friend Shirley Judge (Bobbie Little) has applied for the same job. But whereas he wants the job to make the library better, Shirley sees it as a stepping stone for world domination, with a drive inherited from her mother, the militaristic Marian (Alex Young), who insists her own family calls her “Madam General”.

Matt Cavendish’s weak book turns the zaniness up to 11, with Young in particular called upon to present a larger-than-life character. On stage, with costumes and sets that could help the audience envisage a comedic fantasy world filled with grotesque characters, all the over-the-top performances could feel part of a cohesive production.

But there is a difference to playing grotesque characters in a manner that carries to the back of a theatre auditorium, and playing those same characters to an audience who, thanks to audio playback in headphones, is effectively standing right next to the performer. The former is tolerable; the latter makes you want to rip the headphones from your ears and fling them across the room to make it stop.

Kopel’s character remains the only one presenting at a register that works for the audio medium, and his performance is one of the show’s few highlights. Alan Cox plays his father Erol somewhere between the grounded level of his son and the forced grotesquerie of everyone else, and is much the better at the former. But any such sanity is short-lived, and one is never far away from a scene with a character that has all the subtlety of an over-eager CBeebies presenter.

Bluff has all the hallmarks of a production which realised that an audio production can have a larger scope and scale than a physical stage show ever could. Radio has better pictures, so they say, because the audience imagination can fill in so much more. But to do so, it needs to be primed with a coherence of world-building. Having caricatures shouting their lines as if adding a few decibels will make them funnier does not quite cut it.

One is left with the feeling that Zanders’ songwriting skill deserves an application to a story and style that isn’t so weighted down by unsuccessfully forced attempts at humour.

Scott Matthewman