Edinburgh Fringe Review – A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First
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1 year ago
A playful – sometimes heartbreaking, often funny – watch
A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First is a slick performance that combines clowning with surprisingly emotional rhetoric, says Phoebe Bakker, reviewing the show at the Edinburgh Fringe 2024.
Edinburgh Fringe Review: A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First
Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First (herein A Letter To Lyndon B Johson) follows two young scouts – Grasshopper and Ace – as they navigate boyhood at camp. Setting off on adventures, the boys seek to stabilise their worlds, explore their burgeoning masculinity, and appease their father-like figure, Lyndon B Johnson.
It’s relentless at points: the audience watches at their childhood wonder cracks in the face of war. Armed only with a tyre – the sole prop on a pared-back stage – and plodding along to the tune of a harmonica, their world is flipped around over and over.
The clown pair behind it Xhloe and Natasha have previously collaborated on similarly wordy works, And Then The Rodeo Burnt Down and What If They Ate The Baby. These were great – strong and playful writing – which came through in this work, too.
Through combining clowning with a meaty plot – being a boy in the sixties, and an American idealism that found itself destroyed by the onset of the Vietnam war, and then war itself – the play navigates a dark subject with a lot of light. Their performances are a joy to behold, and their connection to the audience is almost a holy experience. And then it’s sometimes truly devastating: the idealism of boys being sent to war, against the apotheosis of Lyndon B Johnson. Yet it’s often hugely funny, in service of the heartbreak. The comedy lures the audience in until the narrative is ready to break your heart.
This pair are so dynamic and this show so brilliant that you know you will find a perfect new nugget of gold each time you watch – there’s a bucket load of rewatch value here. I would be concerned for my bank account if I knew it wasn’t worth every penny.
You can catch A Letter To Lyndon B Johnson Or God: Whoever Reads This First until August 24th here at the Edinburgh Fringe website.
