Edward Picot
Tuesday 3rd November 2015 7:09pm [Edited]
Kent
138 posts
Obviously a tremendous amount of work has gone into this - but that's the trouble with it. It comes across as overworked. The dialogue is overloaded with wordplay to the point where it feels clogged and unnatural. "Sugar-free is my last name - never make a bet with somebody from the deed-poll service." / "You promised me full benefits." "Well, we'll decide what kind of benefits a fool would get later." / "Juno. D'you know?" Not all wordplay automatically makes people laugh, it doesn't necessarily help our sense of story or character, and it actually makes the dialogue kind of difficult to follow.
Having said all this, it's so weird and unusual and, in its own way, extreme - oddly like something that might have been written in Elizabethan times - that if you can get over your initial feelings of discomfort it becomes kind of absorbing. I certainly got more of the wordplay the second time around than I did the first. "Is your system craving a yeast confection? Then spread your..." I mean, nobody would actually say that, or anything like it, but it does have a certain disgusting something going for it.