Colchester Fringe Festival 2025
Red Bastard
Eric Davis
Genre: Bouffon, Clown, Comedic, Interactive, Performance Art, Physical Comedy
Venue: Colchester Arts Centre
Festival: Colchester Fringe Festival
Low Down
You will love it or you will hate it. Either way, there is no denying the daring power of this bastard. If artists took even a teaspoons of risk Eric Davis takes in Red Bastard, theatre would finally be interesting again.
Review
What is it to be aggressive with an audience? Eric Davis, the star of Red Bastard, receives this note a lot from critics and audiences alike. Before seeing Red Bastard, I had spoken to many people about his work and read the reviews of other critics. To say Davis is infamous is an understatement. Some I spoke to have said he is the greatest thing they have ever seen. Other reviewers were far less kind, finding Davis’s style to be tiring, aggressive, and ineffective. Davis gets as many walk-outs as standing ovations. This all makes Davis the marmite of theatre. You will love his work, or you will hate it.
Red Bastard is a bouffon, a mockery of humans whose deformed shape takes great pleasure in torturing, confusing, and challenging human nature. To be a bouffon is to be akin to a clown. Only where the audience laughs at the clown, the bouffon laughs at the audience. The message of the show is simple: go after what you want. In practice, that message in practice is a complicated mess of emotions and excuses. We are Sisyphus, forever pushing up our boulder of self-pity. Red Bastard has no pity for his audience.
He does not care what your excuse is. When he tells you to move, he will make you move. When he tells you to shout something, he expects you to shout. There is no room for non-compliance, and there is nowhere to hide. Red Bastard plays mind games with his audience. He is three steps ahead of you at any time and has a breadth of experience to keep the audience held under his middle finger. To describe all his nasty tricks would only ruin the joy of his surprises. You can leave at any time, of course. One man did after threatening to punch Red Bastard if he got too close to him. That was the first ten minutes.
The show can be split into two sections. The first being the most chaotic section of the show I just described. Expect to move and interact. The second half comes when Red Bastard begins asking for our dreams, the things that we believe are impossible to achieve, and which he hopes to crush. This section of the show is decidedly different than the first. Slowing down, the thematic elements of Red Bastard arise. The show becomes a direct call to action. Literally… a CALL to action, which one audience member at my performance took. But again, to say too much would ruin the fun and surprises.
Red Bastard is daring. Disgustingly grotesque, aggressive, and yet hugely profound and skilled. It is a masterclass on the power of live theatre. If every artist took risks like these, the theatre would be far more interesting. We all have something to learn from this bastard.
