Salty Brine: HOW STRANGE IT IS (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show)

How Strange It Is is built around Salty Brine’s idea of turning an album into a live show, here Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It is an odd choice in some ways, though perhaps that is the point: the album is famously oblique, and the opening track, “King of Carrot Flowers”, immediately throws together music, autobiography and something altogether stranger.

This much is solidified as Anne Frank makes an early narrative appearance, alongside Brine’s own teenage diaries and recollections of discovering romance and sex. His hatred of Christmas, love of Hanukkah and fascination with the minor tones of the music give the whole thing a macabre edge. The parallel between his teenage discovery and Frank’s own diary writing is interesting, while Frank's hand gives shape to the show.

The sex-education sequence that follows is awkward and pulls us back to the strange deliberately forgotten memories of biology textbook diagrams and pictures, rendering sex itself unfamiliar through its dissection as Brine invites his audience into the world of teenage discovery. That thread becomes strongest when the show is simply about coming of age and burgeoning sexuality.

Meanwhile, moments from Anne Frank's discovery breathe the show its life. Brine is an excellent performer and brings these sections to the audience particularly well. Though outside of and between them, things do become disjointed. Perhaps that is the intention, the colliding worlds and atoms of youth as narrative, but the connection between Brine’s teenage diary and Frank’s is not always easy to follow, particularly as so much of Frank’s story eventually dissolves back into Brine’s sex life.

It becomes less convincing when everything else starts piling in around it. The egotism, initially quirky, endangers abrasiveness as it goes on. That said, Brine has plenty of theatre in him. For example his mutating costume: beginning with a simple scarf before being blown around the stage and eventually becoming a star around his neck as he moves into thoughts of the Big Bang.

And of course I could not finish without mention of Brine's band who are absolutely sublime. The trumpet in particular brings a class to the performance and deserves special recognition, while Brine’s centres the music well. These elements give the show a theatrical life beyond its conceit, even when that narrative becomes harder to hold onto.

Salty Brine: HOW STRANGE IT IS (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show) by The Living Record Collection and Soho Theatre. Credit Han Jie.