Rome and Away: Won’t you Charlton with me?
Michael Monkhouse salutes The Charltons...
One of the great things about MCing is you get a free stage pass. Plus you get a bunch of cool acts to enjoy whilst doing sweet Fanny Adams in the meantime. Plus, if you happen to be me braving the boards at Rome’s Comedy Club last March, said acts include a trio called the Charltons…
Performing an inventive, enticing and invigorating skit which they’ve been kind enough to bung on YouTube, including me at the end discussing the state of my genitals… But enough about me. Back to the Charltons, who were themselves back last month for a breathless, shameless, frownless shenanigans at Rome’s lovely Manhattan Theatre. Where they proved – as buses, Berlusconi and Bros can affirm – that good things come in threes. And because comedy in Rome remains as rare as fragrance in fishmongers, I tracked them down to follow them up and get the low-down (sorry).
Break down the Charltons and you’ll find a threesome as varied as you could wish for. There’s Adriano Agrimi, son of actor/producer Teodoro Agrimi, known in the biz under the nom de plume Teodoro Corrà, once a self-confessed extrovert exuberant adolescent (with a weakness for candid cameras), selecting the classically Brit-sounding nom de teâtre Adrian Thomas…
Then Francesca Romana Cerri, brought up amongst Dad’s voluminous lawyer texts and an equally-classical education prior to psychology, piano and dance training that never distracted her from her true love, classical / experimental theatre…
And last but not – I ain’t even gonna say it – Augusto Puggioni, a statistics graduate but more importantly a reserved, humanly bourgeois ‘unhappy’ clerk trapped between the cold walls of an office, only to transform himself at night-fall into stage animal Otto Brucker, oft glimpsed in the smoky, sweaty ‘alternative’ theatres of the capital.
Confused? Me too. At first. But then I saw the show and, like Python, ‘The Young Ones’ and ‘Boosh’, it all makes sense once they’re together. Or, given that I still crap myself over a couple of ten minutes’ MCing whilst they bestride an hour-long show with glee, I shall give them the stage (see what I did there?): ‘These are magical ingredients which, shaken up with method and a healthy dose of madness (editor’s note: there’s madness in their method), from the start of the new millennium, zig-zagging between television and theatre, we’ve created a comic universe that’s unashamedly unconventional, visionary, Anglo-Saxon – and at the same time materialist, playful and combative… And above all auto-sufficient and independent.’
They’re qualities which make the Charltons the thrilling act they are. Over the last five years they’ve got through grilling auditions for Zelig (our equivalent of the Comedy Store) and performed for T9’s ‘Avanti Tutti’ (our equivalent of ‘Saturday Night Live’ when it still meant something), ‘Shadow of the Colosseum’ (I told you about that) and ‘Gaiba Show’ care of Stefano Vigliante (I’ll tell you about him soon). And last November’s show is getting another blast next January, when I’ll tell you about that too.
Strangely, there are still those who believe that Charlton is a dance popular with Fitzgerald or a band popular with Mancunians. Well in the words of Virginia Woolfe – bollocks. It’s one of the finest, fantasticest and funniest trios in Rome today, and if you can’t get the live experience you can always check out charltons.tk/. And laugh yourselves silly in the process.
