My second trip to the Redgrave this year (of three booked to date), it’s a decidedly different evening of entertainment from Miles Jupp. Sam Campbell is here with two hours plus interval of absolute carnage. It does not stop, it does not slow down, and oh my god.
The really fun here is watching just how often he grins to himself a grin of “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this”. In a good way! He is not tricking you or scamming you or making you laugh at something that isn’t funny - it’s just so bonkers that to have a 350 seater room pretty much uniformly engaging with it is unexpected at best.
There is a sheer commitment to there being no visible structure (although I’d bet good money that this show has been directed to hell and back), and a sheer concentration of material and different ideas that it is hard to accurately gauge what my favourite bit is or remember all the things that I had no time to focus on, but I have already unironically quoted “I am not my thoughts, I am not my thoughts; I am not the soup, I am the bowl” twice and far more than that allowed “I read it in the trades!” into the lexicon.
I’d love to see Campbell MC a gig. Would he survive not on home turf? Does this work because everyone is broadly bought into the idea of him? How delightful though that that’s a possibility, that the nation saw him on Taskmaster and they want more.
In the interval, I looked at some material I’d been writing a few days earlier and found that it sounds so much better read in Campbell’s voice - this wasn’t intentional in the writing, but it’s going to be a real struggle to not do that when I finally finish off that (utterly ridiculous) routine.