list.co.uk/festival Alex Horne | FESTIVAL COMEDY
HIGH F LY I N G
In town with his own award-nominated hour as well as mucking about with his Horne Section pals, Alex Horne tells Marissa Burgess about the tricky tasks behind his convoluted solo show
A lex Horne was probably the last person to expect the return of Monsieur Butterl y after its Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination last year. ‘I didn’t think I was going to tour it because it was too, er, bulky,’ he confesses. Nevertheless it’s been on tour and now it’s made its way back to the Fringe. For those who missed out, the show consisted of Horne telling stories while building a massive squirrel trap out of all sorts of random bits and pieces: think Heath Robinson meets the board game Mouse Trap.
The result was mesmerising, tense and surprisingly poignant. You need a big van to cart it about in, don’t you? ‘I know. But I’ve got this tour manager and he persuaded me that he could lift things for me. So yeah, I’ve been touring it this year and it’s just grown gradually. The difi cult thing is how to grow it without it taking longer than an hour. The show is not massively different, but it is substantially different.’
The motivation for Monsieur Butterl y wasn’t really that Horne needed to catch a naughty squirrel, as he claims in the show. Or that he’d had a new screwdriver for Christmas and wanted to test it out. ‘I’ve got children and I wanted to impress them and show them what I do for a living, do something that they understand and enjoy.’ Meanwhile, the specii c inspiration for his convoluted creation came from a small section in another Edinburgh show he saw a couple of years ago called Slightly Fat Features. ‘It was circusy, really old-fashioned and there was one moment in it where someone set up a
13–20 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 39