Review: Poetry Pass the Parcel - Midland Fringe Festival

Tucked away upstairs at The Pack (Cask & Ale) on Saturday, July 25, The Den was expecting a late afternoon of stand-up comedy with Prateek Kohli. Instead, there was the mild hubbub of confusion and the three familiar faces of Dave Pitt, Emma Pershouse and Steve Pottinger.

What had been billed as a show exploring the everyday absurdities of India and Britain took an unexpected turn when a simple calendar error meant Prateek was nowhere near the stage in Wolverhampton, instead putting the finishing touches to his performance for the following day.

The mix-up left a gaping hole in the Fringe Festival programme and a room full of keen literary enthusiasts waiting for a performance. What were the hosts to do? Pandemonium may be in their title, but pandemonium at this late stage on a Saturday afternoon was certainly not part of the plan.

There was only one solution. Retreating to the bar downstairs, filling their glasses with amber nectar and pretending none of it was happening wasn't an option. The show must go on (as a wise old Queen once sang), and so, with the quick thinking and creativity that have become hallmarks of these three accomplished performers, Poetry Pass the Parcel was born – or perhaps resurrected, as whispers suggested something similar had happened once before.

The premise was simple: 40 minutes on the clock, three performers, each listening to the poem before them and responding with one of their own. What could easily have become 40 minutes of fumbling nonsense instead turned into 40 minutes of pure poetry joy.

The intimacy of The Den perfectly suited the impromptu nature of the performance. The poets laid themselves bare, vulnerable in the knowledge that there was no carefully curated running order to fall back on. It was a genuine privilege for the audience to watch poems emerge from memory, sparked by a phrase, a theme or an unexpected connection to the previous performance. The evident delight on each performer's face as those links appeared made the experience all the more special.

Dave Pitt treated the audience to musings on the impending doom promised by AI and the internet, regaled them with the tale of the men who brought the Slasher back (look it up), returned to the raw anger surrounding the deaths of the 97 Hillsborough fans – with perhaps the standout line of the evening describing "Maggie with her handbag of hatred" – before reducing the room to helpless laughter with the appearance of a talking dildo.

Emma Pershouse began with hilarious children's poetry, drawing huge laughs with her local dialect and impeccable comic timing. She entertained with observations of local characters, car crashes in Wales and what appeared to be deeply rooted trauma over losing a school football competition simply because she was a girl. She insisted she was over it; not everyone was convinced. She closed the show with perfectly timed advice never to buy a chocolate Labrador because, unfortunately, they melt.

Steve Pottinger took the audience on a fast-paced whistle-stop tour of the music industry and its colourful characters, charmed with a love story soundtracked by Enya, attempted to impress with his Latin, then more than compensated with sharp political satire and irreverent, gloriously sweary alternatives to the standard resignation speech. He finished with nostalgic reflections on the passing of time, cheerfully admitting to being that man who remembers when "this was all fields".

The audience had come expecting comedy, but received far more than that. There was humour, anger, nostalgia, politics, philosophy, social commentary and love. There was history and football, Latin and Welsh.

Considering that, just 10 minutes before curtain up, this show did not even exist, the performance was an extraordinary achievement. Dave Pitt, Emma Pershouse and Steve Pottinger demonstrated why they are regarded as experts in their field, producing an hour of inventive, heartfelt and frequently hilarious poetry from almost nothing.

Despite the mix-up, the audience did not miss out on a memorable afternoon. If anything, they experienced something even more precious: poets in their natural habitat, trusting one another, relishing the challenge and creating a one-off performance that could never be repeated in quite the same way.