There’s always a perverse pleasure in going to see a “big” name at the Fringe - this hallowed festival of fringe acts in cramped basements of pubs and thrown together inadvertent masterpieces. What right does a TV name have to come and take over a venue, nay, an audience that might otherwise be predisposed to go to some awful sketch show in a nightclub that smells like a combination of cider and vomit? But yet! But it’s fun! There’s almost a legitimacy to it, having a name on the schedule that my parents might recognise. I do take pains not to do this too often, either in years or in specific schedules, but there’s a fun frisson to seeing an act like Dara O Briain, or Frankie Boyle in this very venue in previous years, in a smaller room than you would ever see him in again. The Assembly Rooms Music Hall is something like 650 capacity - I don’t know what the Bristol Hippodrome is, for example, but it’s certainly bigger than that.
It’s also fun to see someone of the stature of Dara O Briain doing a work in progress gig, on multiple levels. Instructive to compare to Janine Harouni not earlier today, in terms of both quality (or, at least, perceived quality - maybe self-confidence is the word) and in terms of structure. Unlike Janine Harouni, O Briain doesn’t pepper through bits he knows does and doesn’t work - there is preamble of some looser fun stuff, before he gets into the meat of what he wants to talk about (which, WIP, not going to detail, but suffice it to say it’s an extension of his previous tour show). That’s how confident he is in it. And throughout it all, he is doing it with gusto, not betraying for a second that this is quite new stuff. An obvious side effect of however many years he’s been doing this now.
A part of that pre-amble, if not fully examined, is the idea of his place in the world of comedy now. My friends asked whilst we waited in the queue “what’s he actually up to now?” and that’s an excellent question. I would unquestionably put O Briain in the UK comedy royalty heirarchy, but how much does that need to look like active telly work to maintain your status? Is it granted once or does it need to be continually renewed?
A couple of thoughts from a mechanical point of view. First, I really enjoyed his means of accounting for the ad libbed lines that are worth keeping - a necessary evil of the job is that sometimes you say something funny on stage you had no intention of saying and decide you want to say again, but yet that same adrenaline rush that causes you to think of it also causes you to forget it immediately. Most of us chumps have to listen back to the recordings we inevitably make, but O Briain has the status to simply give an audience member a notebook and pen and tell them to write something down when he tells them to. Excellent.
The other is, for all I talked about in point 1 of this being a smaller room than any you’d ever see him in otherwise, this is still maybe in the top 5 Fringe venues by order of capacity. It’s remarkable just the difference that makes, in terms of audience size but also, acoustics - it is a room designed for sound, the laughs linger, the voice carries and has a stagier quality to it than you would get elsewhere. It does make a difference, subtly, instinctively, unconsciously.