Rewind and recoil: Joseph Morpurgo's twisted world of VHS comedy

"Padding around the bar in his stockinged feet as he accepts hugs from friends, comedian Joseph Morpurgo looks as small and scrawny as a bird that has fallen from its nest. It’s a marked contrast from the hour he has just spent performing his show Odessa, stalking the Invisible Dot stage in London as a melange of disparate, desperate characters. Among them is a compulsively unreliable witness, a rancid, flea-bitten Santa and a chauvinistic police chief so manly that even his teeth have stubble. All of these are in some way mixed up in a fire that raged in 1983 in the Texas city that lends the show its title. A news report of this incident kicks off the show: two minutes of discoloured videotape, punctuated by cheesy commercials, all of it scarred with the scratches, blips and blemishes of vintage VHS."Read the full full article, written by Ryan Gilbey, here at http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/nov/12/joseph-morpurgo-comic-supernatural-vhs-show-odessa-invisible-dot