Albert Camus, What's the Score?

fringe round-up

If only Albert Camus had lived, he'd now be raking it in as a football philosophe; autobiographical musings on his days goalkeeping for Algeria as hotly anticipated as the pontifications of Eric Cantona. Instead, it has been left to Nick Whitfield and Wes Williams to broadcast interconnections between the man's art and his favourite pastime via a fan's-eye-monologue. Kitted out in a vile red Umbro strip, Whitfield's Alan initially makes assertions worthy of a demented PhD student. But the comedy produced by his pseudo-angst, as he searches for answers to the big questions on and off the terraces of Wisbech FC, rebounds on English prosaism rather than on France's greatest existentialist: Alan threatens a dog on Hunstanton beach in a homage to the Arab-killing Merceau; orders a packet of peanuts down the pub in the manner of Sisyphus; decides that he will only answer questions in conversation; and hears from Albert prior to his 1960 car crash - "Alan, this is going to be ugly, banal and shapeless." Theatre of the absurd, with a judiciously small a.

n Pleasance (Venue 33). To 31 Aug