PLUCK!

at the Civic

10.02.08

The world's funniest string trio turned up at the “Royal Civic Theatre” again last week, with a show even more surreal than last year's.

Footwear was a feature. Shoes were exchanged, and even stolen from the front row, to the tune of the Moonlight Sonata, arranged, like everything else, for violin, viola and cello.

The evening began with musical chairs: all three musicians managed to shift their seat from behind the potted palms to centre stage without missing a note of the Zauberflote.

And it ended, as all the best classical concerts do, with the 1812 Overture, complete with bells, pyrotechnic effects and tennis balls.

“Yarlsberg” the virtuoso fiddler was joined by adequate viola player Mr Abanathie and obsessive cellist Kadifachi, aka Hogg, who swooned for the Swan, and starred in Pluck's own remake of Psycho. Fans who remember her Fever were delighted to hear her Queen of the Night and Cole Porter's appropriate lyric – Why Can't You Behave ?

We also heard, all too fleetingly, Satie, Zadok, Gloria, Lakme, Ponchielli and the Lark Ascending, and witnessed a classic tea party mime and an instrumentalist plucked from the front row to join the boys in a memorable rendering of Monti's Czardas.