The Burton Brothers: 1925

Monday 4th August 16.20

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A music and comedy sketch show presented as an American radio variety programme with extras, set broadly in 1925, devised and performed by the engaging and immensely talented Australian sibling duo, Tom and Josh Burton. 

I say ‘broadly’, as the music playing as the audience assembles isn’t strictly restricted to 1925, or even to the 1920s.  Some sketches, particularly that relating to Frankenstein and Dracula having a very funny standoff, reference events or films made later - but maybe that’s a minor quibble from someone whose mother was born in that year, and both this reviewer and her 100 year old mother have the memories of an elephant for dates and historical references (yes, the 100 year old mother is still here and remembers events of the late 1920s better than what she had for breakfast…!).

That said, this is a hugely entertaining and tightly written show.  Each brother has a stage personality befitting their appearance – Josh outgoing, outrageous, sometimes manic and slightly dangerous; Tom plays the straight man, gentle, innocent, relatively sane or occasionally simple.  This, I assume, is far from their true characters – they are both highly talented comedy exponents and superb practitioners, with a strong following in their native Australia.  They immediately set the scene for the year 1925, evoking the ebullience of the Jazz Era, when people were desperate to forget the horrors of the Great War – which will not be forgotten, and erupts into the fun in desperate, shocking flashbacks. 

A series of sketches are presented, recreating the entertainments but also the darker concerns of the day, including a running gag involving an American preacher and his formidable wife, which takes a comedic look at the emerging independence of women and the conflict it could cause within marriages as traditional roles were challenged.   

Both brothers are masters of song, dance, mime and movement, and very bendy.  Tom is particularly bendy in an hilarious sketch about a rural innocent abroad, enticed into a fairground Hall of Mirrors, which rapidly had the character in knots and the audience in stitches.  

The running joke, about the preacher’s wife’s withering feelings about her husband, whilst building her own independent business, perhaps ran for slightly too long but involved a small amount of audience participation and improvisation that worked well on the day we attended, when an audience member came up with a particularly pertinent question about married women and bank accounts.  But impro is a dangerous thing, and not every audience can be guaranteed to come up with a question that can be played with so effectively or appositely.  Pastiches of radio adverts for cigarettes are spot on for the attitudes of the time and presented with a sense of ironic authenticity. 

The Brothers certainly pack a lot of the spirit of the 1920s into the hour, and parallels are drawn with today, which remind us that in some ways the human condition has not changed a great deal in a hundred years – whilst other aspects are (thankfully) unrecognisable.  The hour passed too swiftly, and very enjoyably. 

I would happily sit through it again. (TA)

The Burton Brothers: 1925 runs daily until 24th August at The Crate at Assembly George Square - details here