When an annoying Australian reporter asked Noël Coward to say something witty, he simply replied, “Kangaroo.” Words are funny things. They conjure up associations and images; they evolve through a series of aberrations, cultural mutations and human selection. Into this fascinating world, The Dog’s Bollocks ventures at a tongue-twisting lick.
It takes a class act like Gaetan Schmid to transform a language lecture into an hilarious one-man show. The trick is to turn the situation inside out. Schmid creates a predicament. Our lecturer is an eccentric Eastern European professor, billed as Dr Emiritus, with a great knowledge of language, but a poor facility for speaking English. We briefly fear the evening will descend in to Volapük. But Emiritus resorts to physical antics, a blackboard, lots of chalk and a condom. In the end, according to this philologist, we discover most words have their origins in sexual connotations.
Schmid is abetted by director Rob Murray, who successfully keeps the pace frenetic and the energy bordering on volatile – an imperative given the undramatic scenario.
Perhaps Schmid stumbled across the title The Dog’s Bollocks when researching his previous popular comedy The Beer Show (Wychwood Brewery in Oxfordshire used to produce an extra special bitter beer called ‘Dog’s Bollocks’). In both these comedies, Schmid irreverently traces the entire history of Western man, including his civilising mission. This is the most successful part of the show: when Schmid has a dramatic thread and is able to relate the evolution of a word to a mini-storyline. In the Beer Show there was a Babylonian discovering his fermenting hops; here we have the colonists misunderstanding the aborigines before killing them off, and by implication their language too.
The script is quite a feat of imagination, not to forget recall, stringing together as it does an hour-long web of words, driven by associations. The challenge for Schmid is to somehow do this and tell one story. Then he’ll have a tour de force.
