by Alex Scoppie

Opening night of the festival, and Hans Teeuwen (pronounced “Tay-one” – I know because he had the entire room sing it back to him), strode onstage and hammered the hell out of a battered piano, at one point beating the keys like a drum and winking at the bemused crowd.

Having proved his virtuoso skills as a musician, he dragged the packed Phoenix through his bewildering world of buffalo-abuse, interpretive jazz dancing and blind firemen in wheelchairs.

His frenetic, rambling style was too much for some, who loudly walked-out halfway through a waltz he had composed.

But for the less ignorant who stayed, Hans was a bizarre treat; a rubber-faced, filthy-minded contortionist who threw himself about the stage in the same way he pinballed from one insane subject to another.

The audience was kept guessing, but by the end they did not care a jot, succumbing to the infectious madness and singing along to his ridiculous bongo-ode to Nostradamus.

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