Hercules @ Riverside

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Following a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2004, Richard Herring brings his extended new show The Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace to Riverside Studios, London.

Comedian Richard Herring is going through a mid-life crisis. Depressed and disorientated after having split up with his girlfriend, moved house and been stricken with writer’s block, he resolves to take inspiration from the bust of Hercules that graces the front of his new home and perform twelve impossible or arduous labours in the hope of giving his 37 years on this planet some kind of meaning.

Will the small, fat man from Somerset prove that he is a match for the bronzed and toned Roman demi-god? Or, more likely, will he not?

In some of his tasks Herring attempts to emulate Hercules:

· He travels to Scotland to kill the Loch Ness Monster as homage to Hercules’s prodigious slaying of mythical monsters and other endangered species.
· He dates 50 women in 50 consecutive nights, as a nod to Hercules most amazing achievement – impregnating as many women in the same time span.
· He attempts to steal Germaine Greer’s bra, which is the closest thing in the modern world to the girdle of the Queen of the Amazons.

But in other challenges the timid couch potato faces his own worst nightmares:

· Overcoming his twin fears of heights and being splattered into the ground at tremendous speed, by learning to parachute.
· Enduring the arduous training needed to run the London Marathon and row in an Oxford/Cambridge boat race.
· Completing a tortuous childhood game based on car number-plates, which takes him to the brink of madness, but which promises to reveal the meaning of life itself.

He discovers his own real and imagined limitations, challenges the notions of what constitutes a hero and attempts to determine whether we are just playthings of the gods or ultimately in control of our own destinies.

No longer hemmed in by the restrictive Edinburgh time slot, Herring finally has an opportunity to tell the whole story, with a whopping thirty extra minutes of bonus material. He also brings the story up to date, crucially revealing for the first time whether he found true love amongst his fifty dates or whether he’s managed to keep stringing all 50 of them along for the last six months.

January 30, 2005