BWW Reviews: THE COLOUR OF NONSENSE, Riverside Studios, November 9 2010

Punch "biting satire" into Google and back come nearly a million hits: do the same for "gentle satire" and just over ten thousand hits are listed. So not the least innovative element of Forkbeard Fantasy's Colour of Nonsense (at the Riverside Studios until November 21) is the genuine warmth with which it mocks the Contemporary Art, a world familiar to an audience that looked like it had arrived straight from a seminar at Chelsea College of Art.

Located somewhere between Multimedia Installation Art, Performance Art and Theatre, the show (for want of a better word) follows the fortunes of three men and one parrot working, well procrastinating mainly, in a ninth floor studio, as they first lose a commission then gain one before enjoying a brief period as the Gilbert and George of their day (one in the year 2030 as it happens). Along the way, there is much use of film and animation, sound and improvised music and some clever-clever trompe l'oeil projections. We hear a fly on the wall account of a private view from an actual fly that was on the wall and much from a grouchy but ultimately heroic parrot. There are borrowings from The Third Man, from Dumas' The Black Tulip, from The Emperor's New Clothes and, a real highlight for me, a beautiful reading of Edward Lear's "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" accompanied by animated line drawings based on Lear's illustrations. I found elements of the show reminded me of The Guardian's long-running Biff cartoon series and Private Eye's Young British Artists strip, but such is the density of referencing that everyone in the audience will find their own favourites somewhere.

If all that smartarsery makes the show sound more like a lecture than an entertaining night out, that would be misleading, because Forkbeard Fantasy have built their satire on three strong foundations of theatre - story, character and acting. Brothers Tim and Chris Britton, supported by Ed Jobling, bring out the personalities behind the caricature artists Line, Splash and Scuro, as they fret over finance, worry over the threat of younger, edgier artists and guiltily practise their own real strengths as producers of art as commercial as tulip miniatures and comic books. The actor/ performers also don preposterous wigs and costumes to play the villains intent on distracting our heroes from their avant garde work with easy money or defections to the younger, edgier Lenny Spanker, a thinly veiled Damien Hirst.

The Colour of Nonsense's audience may well come to laugh at the arty in-jokes and wonder at the multimedia audio-visual pyrotechnics, but they stay for the story and the performances, in a show that isn't quite theatre, but is funnier than many comedies and sadder than many tragedies.