Review: Josie Long at Harrogate Theatre

Friday, January 27, 2012



A FEW minutes late, sporting her winter look of "Norwegian boy", and "weighing in at between 10 and 12-and-a-half stone depending on how lonely she is", Josie Long bounds into the Studio Theatre.

"I’ve had one hell of a day," she says, offering some traffic-themed apologies and a handful of gags before introducing support act Brigitte Aphrodite.

This singer and poet, clad all in black and boasting a massive personality, treats us to witty, ribald ruminations on the dearth of things to do in Bromley, Kent, drinking herself awake and partaking in sexual congress with a zombie.

Then, after an interval, it’s time for the show proper - and it’s worth waiting for: an endlessly inventive mixture of satire and silliness that juxtaposes the left-field observations of Long’s early act with spiky, impassioned political material that - most importantly - is also wickedly funny.

She adopts a whiny, pleading voice to bemoan the actions of the Conservatives. "They hate the libraries - how can you hate the libraries?" she asks. "Why do they keep trying to sell the forests? You can’t privatise children’s wheelchairs, that’s like what a Bond villain would do."

"I feel like they got together and said: 'Why don’t we set up a 1980s tribute government, I’ve got all the gear’," she adds.

She does a superb routine about what she should have said to a Lib Dem spin doctor on BBC1 programme This Week, and reveals an insecurity about her lack of political knowledge, saying that if she had taken up offers to go on Question Time she would ultimately have broken down wailing: "I’m out of my depth, I’m just a clown."

Her stock of brilliant one-liners includes topical material, like her explanation for Michael Gove’s suggestion that we buy a new royal yacht for the diamond jubilee: "If we give a big enough sacrifice to the Queen, she will ensure a good harvest."

Long’s routines are peppered with four-letter words, but as she cheerily observes: "I have a big, chubby face like a baby, so it doesn’t count. If a baby swears, you’re just glad it spoke."

Her show builds to an impassioned call to activism that invokes the Black Panthers, UK Uncut and Stanley Baldwin - the Conservative Prime Minister who gave a fifth of his wealth to the nation - with Long cheerily concluding: "I think you should go back to where you live and join the EDL", before stressing that this is very much a joke.

Despite the colourful language and left-wing politics, the Harrogate audience only seems uneasy when she claims Ringo Starr was "by far the best-looking of the Beatles", prompting a cry of "No!" from one outraged woman.

The comic does at least acknowledge that Ringo was responsible for "ruining Beatles albums by putting children’s songs in the middle of them."

For the most part, though, this extraordinarily gifted stand-up sticks to political ground.

Affable, accomplished and razor-sharp, her shift into satire has elevated her work to a whole new level.

***

AFTER the show, I bothered Josie and asked her to say some stuff about Harrogate. She did.

“Last year, after the show, me and my friend Johnny (a former St John Fisher pupil) went for a massive long walk all through Harrogate and it was so beautiful. You live in a beautiful place and the people are very generous and didn’t hold it against me even though I was late.”

I also got mistaken for Brigitte Aphrodite's boyfriend, as I'd been hanging around, looking lost. Apologies to all concerned.
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This article was written by Rick Burin and appeared on Page 25 of the Harrogate Advertiser, February 10, 2012. For the review of Josie's 2010 show, clicky here.

Review: Pretending to Be Me at Harrogate Theatre - Sunday, March 20, 2011

Sir Tom Courtenay’s eyes close. His voice raises. His hands raise and shake.

He’s midway through Philip Larkin’s seminal Audabe, and building up a head of steam.

“This is a special way of being afraid,” he says.
“No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die.”

Pretending to Be Me, commissioned by the Larkin Society and first performed in Leeds in 2002, is a remarkable show that brings to life the late poet and Hull University librarian through a 90-minute, in-character monologue drawn from poems, articles and letters.

It offers hot jazz, an obscene anecdote about W. H. Auden and rules you can really live your life by, like: “Distrust any enterprise requiring new clothes.”

“It’s difficult to keep life at arm’s length, isn’t it?” it begins.

Courtenay’s Larkin is thoughtful, acerbic and twinklingly misanthropic, with a fondness for withering, throwaway one-liners aimed at revered institutions, rival poets and himself.

He says that getting married “is like agreeing to stand on one leg for the rest of your life”, dismisses “Ted ‘The Incredible Hulk’ Hughes” with his swaggering masculinity and leather jacket, and then turns his attention to America. Friends told him to only visit the east and west coasts.

“The rest is a desert full of bigots,” he wryly observes.

“I think that’s the part I would like.”

It’s Larkin’s reaction to the prospect of being a poet-in-resident at a US
university that lends the show its name. “I don’t want to go around pretending to be me,” he laments.

Legend

Courtenay, the stage and screen legend of Billy Liar, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and The Dresser, and a fellow son of Hull, makes no effort to look like Larkin and uses a minimum of props; just the odd drink.

But he’s utterly magnetic.

He talks about his childhood stammer, his family and his first forays into verse, then becomes more reflective, considering his ailing productivity, his public persona and - most movingly - his own mortality.

“Just imagine we’re sitting round in a condemned cell,” he says.

“Would we talk about the SDP and the price of fish?”

He concludes that we probably would.

But it’s when Courtenay performs the poems, seamlessly woven into the narrative, that he ups the ante, changing to a more flamboyant style of expression.

It’s as if it’s only when he’s writing that Larkin comes alive - and we see right into his soul.

Bolstering some of the myths around his life (“Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth”) and obliterating others, the show is illuminating, intriguing and ultimately captivating.

It reaches a climax with the poet’s declaration that the one line that sums up his oeuvre is not the potty-mouthed one about his parents, but the final sentiment of An Arundel Tomb: “What will survive of us is love.”

And it’s anchored by a performance of rare intensity and virtuosity from one of Britain’s finest actors.
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This article was written by Rick Burin and appeared on Page 31 of the Harrogate Advertiser, March 25, 2011.

Comedy review: Richard Herring at Harrogate Theatre

Monday, March 7, 2011



A ball of fire hits the stage of Harrogate Theatre and Richard Herring slumps to the floor.

“I do believe in you, God, ” he whimpers. “I’ve just been showing off, trying to impress girls.”

It’s the silly, whizz-bang climax to a two-hour show about Jesus that made me laugh harder than just about anything I’ve seen since Herring’s last visit to the town a year ago.

To me, he’s the best stand-up around at the moment. While his freeform internet broadcasts, written within a week or entirely improvised, are touched with brilliance, they’re also wildly erratic, almost by definition.

His touring shows, on the other hand, are honed night after night until they’re just about flawless.

Despite a few abrasive lines, this one isn’t the Christian-baiting shock-fest you might fear, but an incisive and entertaining look at Herring’s atheism and his apparently contradictory obsession with Jesus, boasting his usual strong suits of elevated pedantry and faux self-obsession.

In it, he offers his own aphorisms (which bear an uncanny resemblance to the opening lines of TV theme tunes) and parables (a succession of hysterical stories he penned as a child) and attempts to recruit some disciples.

“Ask me if I’m Jesus, ” he tells his first follower.

“Are you Jesus?” the man enquires.

“That is what you say, ” Herring replies.

The comic also tries to answer some of the big theological questions, like: “Why did Jesus always call Simon ‘Peter’? Is it like the way Trigger always called Rodney ‘Dave’?”

Three of his routines are so effective that the audience seems to be collectively willing him to stop so it can catch its breath.

Stupid plonker-wallies

Scrutinising the Ten Commandments, he laments the over-writing and confesses that he once failed to honour his father and mother, calling them “stupid plonker-wallies” to their faces.

Then he pours scorn on page one of Matthew’s gospel, adopting the persona of the disciple’s publisher to declare: “It’s rubbish, Matthew. Begat isn’t even a word.”

Herring knows what he’s talking about, incidentally. He spent four days memorising the opening genealogy, then five minutes on stage taking the mickey out of Booz of Rachab’s name.

Early in the second half, he launches into an inspired riff based on a letter he received about his show from an irate Christian, containing eight instances of people who’ve mocked God and then been brutally killed.

“This is definitely true, ” he says, moving on to the final example. “You can tell by the way none of the people have names and it obviously never happened.”

“Jesus did say: ‘If someone offends thee, send them a threatening passive-aggressive email’, ” he adds.

But Herring does concede that an extremely drunk heckler, who invites the whole audience to a party, may have been sent by God to punish him. When he isn’t removed, Herring speculates that he must be a local dignitary.

In fact, “God” intervenes in more showy fashion near the close, as the lights go off, there’s a small explosion and Herring immediately begins to mock-repent.

That takes us into the unexpectedly reverential final spiel, where the comedian becomes more serious, ultimately expressing his admiration for Jesus and for Christian values, detached from his distaste for organised religion.

Along with two extended dream sequences - in which Herring engages in a bike race with Jesus - it effectively crystallises the dichotomy at the heart of the show, if slowing the laugh-rate a little.

Early in the set he’d asked who really believed Jesus was the son of God.

I’m not really one for audience participation, but I figured this was quite important, so I raised my hand.

At the end, he asks from the stage if he’s managed to change my mind.

I’m afraid not, I say.

Great show, though.
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This article was written by Rick Burin and appeared on Page 21 of the Harrogate Advertiser, March 11, 2011.

Review: Ardal O'Hanlon at Harrogate Theatre

Friday, October 22, 2010



Ardal O’Hanlon is pretending to put his leg in the Large Hadron Collider.

And, for just an instant, he morphs into Father Douglas Maguire, the endearing, enduring innocent he played in sitcom Father Ted.

It’s a lovely moment in a set that’s otherwise ruled by O’Hanlon’s stand-up persona: irascible, irreverent and trivially vindictive.

This is the first time the comic has played Harrogate and he starts in style, encouraging two lengthy ovations.

Then he makes a few latecomers repeat the exercise, before claiming that everyone else has already done an impression of a bear.

Strolling confidently around the stage, he reveals he was named after the scene of an industrial disaster, saying his brothers are called Chernobyl and Hiroshima. And Wetherby.

A group at the back shout their disapproval.

“Ah, ” says O’Hanlon. “Maybe I should have picked somewhere further away.”

Outsourcing

The economic climate has impacted on everyone. O’Hanlon says he’s had to outsource his joke-writing to India - and a chap named Sanjeev.

“Most of my current material is about arranged marriages and the perils of bathing in the Ganges, ” he says.

This proves to be untrue.

Instead, he focuses on sex, family and the oddness of Ireland, while touching on such diverse topics as DIY (“I need a man in my life”), fictional pals (“My imaginary friend had an imaginary friend who was a real person. He was a lad in my class at school”) and murderers (“They’re awful eejits, wearing jumpers on their heads. The time to wear a jumper on your head is when the police are looking for you”).

There’s a dark streak a mile wide running through O’Hanlon’s show, but it never feels forced or overbearing, because of his offhand, engaging manner.

And every so often he corpses, which just adds to the fun.

He’s tried living every day as if it was his last, “in bed with an oxygen mask and a bedpan”.

With his brothers, he’s had to decide what to do with their ailing mother. “Ever since the accident, she spends the whole day looking through the window. I wanted to let her in, but they where having none of it.”

The audience roars.

“I don’t know why that’s funny, ” O’Hanlon deadpans. “That Sanjeev is sick.”

Moving on to bedroom matters, he says he’s always had trouble with bras, leading to more difficulties than you might think. “Sometimes my wife slings a bra across the front door and I can’t even get in the house, ” he says.

He recalls his father teaching him about the birds and the bees, coughing nervously for an age, before blurting out: ‘You know girls don’t have willies.’

“To this day I still associate sex with tuberculosis, ” he says.

Enemies

Now he has kids of his own. At first he wasn’t keen on the idea.

“I’ve enough enemies without spawning more, ” he says.

“Also I’m Irish, so I don’t want anyone to inherit my land... ever.”

The experience has left him confused. Children change all the time. He slips into a bass voice to impersonate his son on the answerphone: “There’s nobody here now, I’ve got them in a bag.”

He continues to attract adversaries. He recently asked an overweight woman: ‘When are you due?’

“Then I realised she wasn’t pregnant, so I added: ‘another snack’. Got myself out of that hole.”

Now scandals in the Catholic Church have left him in a tricky position.

“You can’t even admit to being a fictional priest anymore, that’s what I find, ” he says.

It’s only when he mimes sticking his hand, leg and some Maltesers in the Large Hadron Collider that we see a trace of the mischievous, guileless Dougal.

But that’s fine.

O’Hanlon’s stand-up persona is so blackly engaging and his show so enjoyable that we don’t miss his most famous creation a bit.
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This article was written by Rick Burin and appeared on Page 25 of the Harrogate Advertiser, October 29, 2010.