Jason Cook has masterly audience skills, and he needed them all the night I saw him. A middle-aged teacher (who really should know better), whose refreshment clearly led her to the delusion that she was the person people had paid to see, kept interrupting. Even the engaging and unfailingly polite Geordie comic's patience was wearing thin, but he constantly bested her and got on with the job of making us laugh.
When you watch Glenn Wool, you realise the heights that a talented performer can reach simply by standing on stage and telling stories – not all of them necessarily true - when they are weaved with wonderfully crafted gags and slow-burn pay-offs, with some subtle political humour also in the mix.
When you watch Glenn Wool, you realise the heights that a talented performer can reach simply by standing on stage and telling stories – not all of them necessarily true - when they are weaved with wonderfully crafted gags and slow-burn pay-offs, with some subtle political humour also in the mix.
It has been, we can safely agree, a truly terrible week. Art, culture, call it what you will, is unequal to the task of diagnosing a nation’s ills, let alone curing them. But on a night such as the inaugural Comedy Prom, it comes equipped with healing balm. This evening was maybe not perfect. There were wrinkles, little bits here and there that didn’t quite work. But the Saturday night that the BBC Proms gave over to the business of laughter could not have been more opportune. This is going to sound hokey, but comedy on this occasion brought its audience close to a state of grace.
Something seems to have shifted in Jackie Leven’s life. About six stone, to be precise. At the Edge Festival show the Fife-born folk-blues-soul troubadour was, almost literally, half the man he used to be: the rotund, Rabelaisian figure of old was dramatically slimmed down and sipped water rather than, as at a recent Edinburgh gig, glugged from a bottle of white wine. Perhaps it’s the side effect of a bladder infection he told us (a little too much) about, and which necessitated a “comfort break” halfway through. Or perhaps, at 61, this notoriously hard-living man is finally looking after himself.
Something seems to have shifted in Jackie Leven’s life. About six stone, to be precise. At the Edge Festival show the Fife-born folk-blues-soul troubadour was, almost literally, half the man he used to be: the rotund, Rabelaisian figure of old was dramatically slimmed down and sipped water rather than, as at a recent Edinburgh gig, glugged from a bottle of white wine. Perhaps it’s the side effect of a bladder infection he told us (a little too much) about, and which necessitated a “comfort break” halfway through. Or perhaps, at 61, this notoriously hard-living man is finally looking after himself.
After 12 years in the business, Dana Alexander, an ebullient and instantly likeable presence on stage, is still the only black woman on the Canadian comedy circuit. Not that her ethnicity is Alexander's pre-occupation – it most definitely isn't – but it does play a part in her act.
Imagine that Tim Burton, or some other great modern-day storyteller of your choice, knocks at your door and asks if he can come into your living room for an hour to tell some fantastical stories. You would get some beers in and friends around pronto, right? Well, the Lounge Room Confabulators, a duo from Australia who tell stories in the Burton style of weird and dark, do just that – turn up on your doorstep and then perform in your front room, your garden or your office, wherever you have space for 10 or more people.
Margaret Cho is back, and how. Ten years away from the Fringe, the American-Korean bisexual - “I'm just greedy, I guess” - is a little softer around the edges maybe, but still as funny. With her lefty humour, punctuated by lots of adult content, she is waspish, but definitely not Waspish.
David Greig's indie comedy musical, first performed at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre at the end of last year, is a bright and inventive four-hander about a 16-year-old girl struggling to keep everything together. Duck Macatarsney (Gemma McElhinny), who writes escapist stories in her room, cares for her biker dad, known as Duke, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. At the beginning of the play Duke (Keith Macpherson) is struck blind.
The award-winning Australian comedian Sam Simmons is shuffling around in a pair of bread loaves. He's wearing them like slippers and trying to take bites out of them at the same time. Indeed, his tremendously silly show, Fail, is essentially a shambles. This is the overarching joke: it's his absurd non-sequiturs and his tongue-in-cheek, shamateur performance style that reduce his audience to spasms of laughter.
Latitude: this four-day event in the attractive environs of Henham Park, near Southwold, is, as its slogan says, “more than just a music festival”. Quite so. But how to review such a groaning cultural smorgasbord? This year, rather than delivering an indigestible wodge of words, I thought I’d take a slightly different approach; thus my account of my four days in Suffolk is divided into thematic sections which correspond only roughly to the festival’s own creative categorisations. So here we go.