Many hands make comic-noir Bruce work
Like all modern heroes, Bruce is a complicated guy. Well, maybe not "guy" exactly. Bruce is a complicated chunk of mattress foam with eyes stuck in it and a pair of disembodied, white-gloved hands. Sometimes three.
Bruce only has three hands when he's an hallucinating junkie but not when he's an astronaut or a cop, a bestselling author or a newborn baby, a doting father, a tongue-tied suitor or an old man.
No matter how he's counting his hands, though, Bruce has a problem with eyes. Not his two but the one that his former partner, One Eyed Joe, lost when Bruce unwisely took a shot in a police raid.
Joe, who grew up dreaming of being an astronaut himself, wants revenge.
And so the chase is on - along mean city streets and down grimy sewers, across time and space. The vengeful one-eyed ex-cop and his former partner locked in a decades-long dance of death. Well, maybe that's putting it a bit strongly.
Like another Bruce, the eponymous hero of the Bane trilogy at this year's Perth Fringe, our foamy friend inhabits a comic-noir world, where every convention is observed and every hard-boiled line lovingly reworked for laughs.
Tim Watts and Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd, who created Bruce and play his head (Watts) and hands (Nixon-Lloyd), have another venerable convention to observe - time travel. Here, they have some tidying up of character and narrative to do for clarity's sake.
While they're at it, they might discreetly apply a scalpel to proceedings. Watts and Nixon-Lloyd's minimalist approach, while its discipline is impressive, leaves them overstaying their welcome just a smidge. Still, there's never been a play that couldn't shed a few minutes.
But those minor shortcomings are not what I'll take away from Bruce. Its dizzying audacity is a marvel throughout.
I'll remember Bruce shuddering as he re-enters Earth's atmosphere, like Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey; his gutsy sweetheart Debbie billing and cooing as she tries to guide him safely back to terra firma; Annie Lennox's voice floating in the void while Bruce (and his Brucettes) lip-synch along to Why; Bruce and Joe's eyes (in Joe's case, eye) glinting in the dark as the chase hots up. It's all glorious stuff.
Watts and his talented cronies are about to embark on the next stage of their careers and I'm sure that Bruce, ironed out and spruced up, will be one little bloke they take with them on that adventure.
