Tim Key, besuited and wearing a baseball cap, stands on stage as the audience files in, smiling sweetly as people take their seats. He’s on stage but, in keeping with many of the acting roles that non-comedy fans may know him from – Alan Partridge’s Side Kick Simon and the lazy office manager Ken in The Paper, to mention just two – he’s unobtrusive. Many don’t clock his presence at all.
But then – show time! – the baseball cap’s flung off, he’s stamping his foot and demanding our attention. We give it easily for the next 70 minutes of Loganberry, in which Key - more a storyteller than gagmeister in comedy terms - weaves a fascinating and funny tale.
Loganberry is a playful game with the audience, as he wrongfoots us several times. His vocal tone shifts, from barely audible to microphone blast, and he moves around the stage, or stands stock still. Nothing is predictable but everything holds our focus.
Key’s story starts with his realisation – whatever his inner child tells him – that he’s middle-aged. The truth hit when Gabby Logan (there’s a lot of ironic name-dropping in the show) asked him to appear on her podcast, The Mid-Point. Why on earth would she ask him? Oh yes, he’s in his forties…
Along the way he talks about his achievements, naming a few – Perrier award winner and winning a week on Richard Osman’s House of Games among them – rivalries with other comics, his visit to Japan, and using dating apps. Meeting young women in real life, he says, is “lovely when you see them in the wild away from the app”.
In a sort of career/life assessment, he has fun with the idea of having a rampant ego and the difficulties of being sort-of but not quite famous. It’s as if he’s daring us to scoff – but he always follows a boast with a smile or a knowing wink.
Key reaches into various pockets as he tells his story and takes out playing cards with poems and observations written on them. Like the discarded cards themselves, towards the show’s end Key gathers its disparate elements together as he tells another anecdote, but a sombre one.
Key drops a bomb but we don’t see it coming after all this playfulness, so it has even greater effect. It’s a midlife crisis show, yes, but a very original one.
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