If you are feeling a little low this weekend a big helping of Ben and James — not Ben & Jerry — is in order to cheer you up.
The “devilishly handsome” pair of Benjamin Stratton and James Percy from Britain brings you Potted Potter, an unauthorised Harry Potter parody improv at Ductac in Mall of the Emirates.
It was my perfect antidote on Wednesday, bringing an otherwise gloomy day to a cheerful end. Stratton was greeting the audience as we moved into our row and immediately started to wave to me and my friend.
“You’ve made it! Just in time too,” he said laughingly shaking our hands.
On the stage sat a solemn figure on a colourful toy train engine reading a book.
“That’s James,” continued Stratton. “I’ll introduce him to you in a minute”.
What followed was an hour-long laugh riot with Percy and Stratton dissecting J.K. Rowling’s Boy Wizard masterpieces, chopping fabulous magical tales patiently crafted by Rowling in thousands of pages to mere 10-minute episodes of hilarity.
Apart from the fact that the laughs are based on the Harry Potter books, there is nothing on stage that could be said to follow a plot. And if it was scripted, it must be mentioned that it didn’t seem so. It was more a friendly banter between two teenaged — yes, teenaged because you won’t usually find adults being so idiotic on stage — friends arguing about books and who plays what character. Often you’ll find Percy and Stratton referring to themselves by their real names rather than the characters they play on stage.
While Percy decides he wants to play Harry Potter — because he’s the Potter buff — and Stratton plays all the “other” characters, half way through, like a little boy, he wants to switch roles. However, each plays his character to side-splitting perfection, many a time laughing at their own actions with the audience.
And you cannot not play the quidditch game. One lady in the row behind us bore the brunt for having to get up and fetch the inflated ball from where it had landed two seats away as the audience played quidditch. Yours truly took a little of it too as the “deluminator” (a magical device that eats up all the lights in one place) was used to remove all light and my phone flashed in the darkness as I sat taking notes.
The best part is you don’t need to be a Potter buff to watch this show, though it does help to understand some jokes better. For me, the best part started with Book 3, maybe because it was with The Prisoner of Azkaban that my real interest in Harry Potter began. The first two books were more of children’s tales.
And I guess I wasn’t the only adult in the audience who was a Potter fan. A gentleman two rows ahead who was the first to have his hand up in the air to be a seeker in the live quidditch match — and refused to put it down despite Stratton saying “you are not a kid”.
