onionbagblog

To @ColchesterArts on Wednesday evening for the second time in a week. There’s even fighting talk of a third visit before the weekend kicks in.

Cripes.

I’m never quite sure exactly where the burgeoning Colchester Cultural Quarter actually starts and where it ends. In our short stay around these parts, we’ve found more artistic entertainment on offer than the bright lights of London ever tempted us with.

Price of course is all-important. Paying over the odds for a ropey West End production, or keeping it local in Sunny Colch, with a £15 ticket to see the magnificent Mark Thomas entertain us for more than two hours?

Yep, the “investigative journalist disguised as a comedian” came to Colchester this week for two performances of his Extreme Rambling show. I booked on the premise that I’m something of an extreme rambler myself - I did manage to walk all the way to Rowhedge once.

But how much humour can you extract from the Middle East? If you’re Mark Thomas, then two hours of punch lines, and still you leave with the deep political message contained in the performance.

Thomas walked the entire length of the Israeli Separation Barrier, crossing between the Israeli and the Palestinian side. Out of this experience he has put together the Extreme Rambling show, telling the story of the people he met along the way and their struggles.

The walk itself was 750km; the show is condensed into two hours, with the perfect pace and packed full of detail as his holiday by mistake unfolds. Thomas brings out the personal stories in the message, describing the madness that is the Middle East.

No laughing matter? His tale about a Palestinian zoo where a dead giraffe had been stuffed with a certain artistic licence, and then put up as a symbol of the resistance, was certainly unique for Colchester on a Wednesday night.

This was a decent Colchester audience. It wasn’t quite Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow - and thank heavens for that. It was a sympathetic local crowd, showing that there is a home for political satire in Sunny Colch.

Future shows @ColchesterArts include Mark Steel, Fairport Convention and the Colne Valley Youth Orchestra.

Now that’s what I call a Cultural Quarter.

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