Big venues need supersize standup

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Standup’s growing popularity has seen it emerge from pubs and clubs to grander venues from the Nottingham Arena to the Albert Hall. Now the comedy must develop to fit them You know all those fringe theatre shows that reduce epic stories to pint-sized performances? I’m thinking of Ben Hur at BAC , or Spymonkey’s Moby Dick – the joke, or chutzpah, behind which is that the material is wildly out of proportion with the lo-fi staging. I was reminded of them when watching John Bishop perform standup at the Albert Hall . Around Bishop, an arena whose elegance, ornamentation and vast size were designed with the profound, the heart-soaring and the ineffable in mind. Onstage, a man cracking gags about trips to Ikea. This incongruity was in some ways the daftest joke of the evening. I’m not saying Bishop doesn’t belong in the Albert Hall – far from it. I’m all for demotic, democratic entertainment gatecrashing elitist buildings. But (at least until his song’n’dance finale) the quotidian nature of his shtick created an odd contrast with the venue. The act of talking to people from a stage about, say, the domestic habits of one’s wife was not originally undertaken with the Albert Hall in mind. The pub-chat school of standup was originally just that – a bloke with a microphone in a bar or working men’s club, talking to like-minded barflies. That style still prevails, and works fine on TV and in your average standup venue. But its smallness is exaggerated by arenas; the Albert Hall exposed the modesty of Bishop’s comedy in a way that even Edinburgh’s sizeable McEwan Hall (where I first saw the show) didn’t. The following night, I went to see Scott Capurro in the tiny Etcetera Theatre, a 41-seat room above a Camden pub. That was a disconcerting experience too – partly because Capurro deserves a bigger audience, and partly because a teensy studio theatre is an odd environment for a wilful provocateur to ply his trade. Capurro needs to be public, not private, to generate a frisson. A cabaret-style venue, where we can clock one another’s discomfort; a decent-sized theatre, whose audience can develop some kind of collective identity, and in which a collective gasp or bristle might really register – these are the spaces where his comedy would thrive. As standup booms, we’re going to see it in more and more shapes and sizes of venue, which is fine. But a show that works one way in Pleasance Two may work differently in the O2. In a tiny room, standup can feel confrontational, awkward or marginal. In an enormo-dome, it may feel low-horizoned or artistically unambitious. There are plenty of exceptions: Tim Minchin’s current orchestra show is one blazing example; Lee Evans’s energy could pin you to the back wall of the Nottingham Arena. Right now, standup is still amazed to find itself in the Albert Halls of this world – a point the incredulous Bishop repeatedly made onstage. But as comedy gets used to the promotion, here’s hoping we see more acts respond, in more ambitious ways, to the grand scale on which their work can now be performed. Comedy Brian Logan guardian.co.uk

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Posted by on May 3, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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