Bosom Buddies

Now in its third non-consecutive Fringe incarnation since its 1994 debut, Bosom Buddies sees the writer and actor Jack Klaff portray some two dozen of the 20th century's greatest intellectuals, statesmen and villains in the space of 75 minutes. It's a bold attempt to explore the interactions between great men from history, but unfortunately Klaff tends to lose himself in a mire of caricature acting and dense esoterica.

Bosom Buddies is more philosophical treatise than theatrical biography. Each of Klaff's characters is treated to only a cursory examination, and although he co-opts their accents and manners of speech and paraphrases their ideas, there is little true insight into their personalities. As Hitler and Stalin, Klaff is blandly psychopathic, while his Gandhi and Mandela are faint caricatures.

But Bosom Buddies' greatest flaw is the narrative dissonance which pervades it: while Klaff tries to weave together stories and vignettes from the lives of his subjects, the shifting of characters is so frequent as to render it completely disorienting. Einstein, Bohr, Freud and Jung all sound much the same, which becomes infuriating when they spend much of the show talking to one another.

There is a vague attempt to focus on these men through the lens of the women who knew and loved them—as Sabina Spielrein, colleague of Jung and Freud, or Bertrand Russell's mistress Lady Ottoline Morrell, for example—but this falls by the wayside as an underexplored secondary theme. As academia, Bosom Buddies could have been interesting; as theatre it's just a mess.