Storytelling has amusing bite in Vampires in Barcelona

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      Written and performed by Brian Cochrane. Directed by Jamie King. A Skinny Walrus Projects production, presented with Rumble Theatre, as part of the rEvolver Festival. At the Jim Green House Studio on Thursday, May 25. Continues May 27 and 30, and June 1 to 3

      Aside from a few theatrical touches, Vampires in Barcelona is a little like sitting over a beer with a friend and recalling past adventures—the kind you had when you were young, fearless, and able to drink and smoke till you puked. In fact, throughout his new one-man show, charismatic performer Brian Cochrane sips from a cold brew he keeps under a magician’s jaunty top hat.

      It’s the kind of storytelling that’s well-suited to the rEvolver Festival’s cabaretlike Jim Green House Studio stage, an intimate, candlelit den that was packed and buzzing on opening night. And the lights dim considerably when our affable host opens the show with an admission about being scared of the dark—a lifelong fear that started in his basement bedroom and TV room when he was a kid in Saskatoon and that will come back to haunt him on a trip to Barcelona in 2006.

      It’s a long, wandering story, one that flits to France, where the 22-year-old Cochrane is chasing a woman he’s not sure he’s in love with, then on to a long train trip to Barcelona, where he ends up in the drinking car with a bunch of strangers. It culminates in a hostel stay off La Rambla, where the young backpacker has a chance meeting with a Hungarian magician who shows him a picture of his “vampire” girlfriend, who’s just left him for his best friend, and tells him about a bloodsucker bar in Barcelona.

      In a successful device, Cochrane switches back and forth from microphone bits, with which he tells his story in the third person (giving his show structure), to mikeless asides, where he explains things like what Catalan is or asks who in the audience would actually go to a vampire bar if they were told about one (giving his production a conversational intimacy).

      The show is at its best when Cochrane gets candid with some of his most fearless material—an embarrassing incident in the hostel’s shared WC, say, or, in the show’s hands-down biggest laugh, the last, absurd words that the magician ever says to him. Cochrane’s a master of the deadpan pause, relaying some outrageous incident, then lifting an eyebrow to contemplate it with a single WTF look at the audience.

      On opening night, the actor was still getting into his groove, on rare occasions telling the story more than owning it the way it needs to be owned; those jitters should work out through the run. And attempts to couch the story as a coming-of-age metaphor, especially when it comes to love, feel just a tiny bit forced.

      Vampires in Barcelona is best when it’s just riding the bizarre randomness of events as they occurred. Just as the memoir is seeing a boom in the book world, storytelling performance, at The Moth and beyond, is trending. People want to hear something real and honest, and Cochrane offers all that, and ample self-deprecating humour, too. For rEvolver-goers, there’s also going to be extra appeal here if they’ve ever hauled around an overloaded backpack and a dog-eared copy of Let’s Go Western Europe, lived on cheese and lettuce, or gotten stoned on a Renfe train.

      Comments