American Gun Show

American Gun Show features no actual guns, much to the obvious annoyance of the group of shell-suited and sunglass-adorned American tourists drawn in by the alluring name who fail to utter a single chuckle in the space of an hour.

But this is the point, and AGS is a show by an American about guns that just happens to makes a deal of not having any.

The American in question is Chris Harcum, "an actor playing a comedian" from South Carolina via New York. Harcum has a highly personal story to tell about America’s relationship with hand-held armaments, and he does it relatively interestingly using accounts of his daily life and his struggle to comprehend the gun culture which dominated his home town and affected him personally.

There are some dead ends and duds, and the audience participation jars slightly with the rest of the show. The songs are just a bit awkward and he fails to grasp that a festival audience is not a Scottish audience, but he pushes on with a very strong central idea toward a thought-provoking climax.

If it lost the performative left-wing desire to present a more positive view of Americans to the outside world and was less apologetic about its origins, it could be a brilliant piece of participative theatre. Harcum tries to use comedy to show the absurdity of gun culture, but as an apparently competent actor, he could afford to drop the jokes altogether and dare to tackle the issue head on.