fringe: the bridge

In almost every Fringe there's at least one show where you leave and say "well that was... interesting". It's not bad necessarily, but it also doesn't blow the roof off. Maybe there was something there though.

I think The Bridge by Green Eggs and Ham (aka actor-writers Nick Rinke and Caitlin Docking) is very much one of those shows.

The premise is simple enough, the (unspecified) apocalypse has been and gone and the mostly nameless protagonists, Man and Woman (I think she gets called Alice once) are trying to make it to San Francisco where there might be people. And they entertain themselves with hand shadow puppets and stories and songs. And a decent Christopher Walken impression from Rinke.

Some of the shadow puppet stuff is actually really good... I think a lot of that is really where Rinke and Docking's writing works best, injecting a little dark humour into what is understandably really a very bleak story.

I'm just not sure that the chemistry between the two when they're outside of the puppet zone works at all... there's at least part of it that feels kind of creepy when Rinke is explaining something towards the end of the piece.

I also feel like the big emotional moment for Rinke's character is kind of thrown out there and then moved past really quickly without letting the impact of it settle. It also feels a little strange that Docking's character gets a monologue to "the audience" whereas Rinke's doesn't.

It also feels like the moment where they move the "puppet theatre" off the stage just stops the whole show dead in it's tracks, which isn't great when there's really only one scene left.

It may just be that they need some time to get comfortable with both the characters and the story or it needs to be given a little more meat on it's bones. I feel like they have an interesting, if slightly short, story here, it just needed something more.

yani's rating: 2 flashlights out of 5