ANTOINE FEVAL - LANTERN CHURCH FELLOWSHIP HALL (BSMT)

FRIDAY, JULY 30 @ 8:00PM

My first show of this year's Fringe!  Yay!  There's a lot of buzz about Antoine Feval, not least because performer Chris Gibbs won 2009's "Best of the Fest" award his show last year, The Power of Ignorance.  As such, I went to Antoine Feval with high hopes.  And I wasn't too disappointed.  Did it quite live up to my expectations?  No.  But it was pretty darn good.

Gibbs parodies Sherlock Holmes, and his amazing powers of deduction, by telling the story of a completely gullible Holmes-lover, Barnaby Gibbs (A bit of self-deprectating humour here?  Gibbs and Gibbs?), and his encounters with the mysterious Antoine Feval, whom Barnaby believes, naively, to be just as great a detective as the one born of Arthur Conan Doyle's imagination.  As Feval tells Barnaby, "A buttoned-up shirt is a mystery to you."

Gibbs's "stand-up-and-tell-a-story" show is full of gentle humour, and the audience certainly seemed to enjoy it the night I was there.  He's a likeable performer, coming out at the beginning to warm-up the crowd and get them used to his British dialect.  During the show I saw, he broke from Barnaby's or Feval's character a few times to chastise an audience member for reading a program, to respond to the audience's tongue-in-cheek "oohs" and "ahhhs" at the obvious twists and turns of his tale, or to make a humorously snide comment about the Fringe experience.

I enjoyed the show, but I think the central joke of Barnaby's complete and utter naivete got a bit tired after 75 minutes.  Perhaps the script could have stood a bit of trimming?  Also, I don't know if Gibbs will break character as much every show to interact with the audience, but I thought that also wore a bit thin as the minutes ticked on...

All in all, though, a very likeable, feel-good, funny show.  And the humour is pretty clean, so a good choice for kids.  (Though they may get a bit bored by the lack of action...)