PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Colston Hall, Bristol (Thur 20-Sun 23 Oct)

COMEDY The best moment of this local-boy-made-good's triumphant return to Bristol is the spoof re-staging of a school play he claims to have written as an earnest teenager, passionate to make his classmates at Hanham High School aware of important “social issues”. OK, he probably didn't really write it, but Stephen Merchant's version is very, very funny indeed – and you want to believe it's at least based on truth, because it reveals something about Merchant that makes him much more than your average stand-up.

The school play comes at the end of a fast and furious hour of comedy during which Merchant determines to escape from the shadow of “you know who”: and indeed, the spirit of Ricky Gervais does hover above the stage from time to time. We'll forever argue about who influenced whom the most, but by now the two have been mates for so long they deliver punchlines with the same voice. Perhaps that's something Merchant will never truly escape. But what is certain from this show is that he's a sophisticated, formidable and classy performer in his own right.

Merchant has 'funny bones' (an expression old comedians used when describing Tommy Cooper): just looking at him makes you laugh. He's been 6 foot 7 since he was a teenager and – in classic comedy-as-defence-mechanism guise – has developed a lot of tall jokes to create comedy out of that disadvantage. So, for example, we're treated to a great funny-walks sequence, arising from a doctor's advice to bend at the knees instead of stooping. Elsewhere, Merchant shows us how he learnt to negotiate low doorways by sudden dips to 5 foot 4 (“I'm 6 foot 7, the average front door is 6 foot 4. That's one of the main reasons I never became a Jehovah's Witness.”)

Other routines cover fairly well-worn stand up territory (textspeak, noisy cinema food, horrible children at weddings...), but the bulk of the show – as the title suggests – is given over to Merchant's romantic failures, or how, as he puts it "There's not much repeat business back at Chez Steve.” The comic premise has Merchant as a poor, hard-done-by bloke doing everything possible to find the woman of his dreams, against whom circumstances always unreasonably conspire. But, as he seeks to explain how none of these failures have been his fault, Merchant the performer slowly (and cleverly) reveals too much about his comic persona – until we're left in no doubt that this man deserves to be alone, as he's clearly the most insufferable sexist, pedantic geek on the planet. Worse still, he's tight-fisted too (“I took her to the pictures and she wanted popcorn but I'd wisely bought Butterkist at Costcutter. The cinema was charging £3 a tub but I only wanted £2 from her for mine.” This section of the show climaxes (exactly the right word) in a trick-camera, close-up view of what Merchant calls his “Sex Face” projected onto a giant screen. Pity the poor woman forced to experience that in real life, goes the joke.

The entire show is very funny, but the re-staging of the school play lifts it into a different league. Picking two members of the audience to join him on stage, Merchant seeks to recreate his first attempt to write something for his classmates that was naively, self-consciously “significant”. “Don't attempt to act,” he tells his hapless volunteers, “I want this to be just the way it was back at school in Hanham, so just read the lines.” Merchant's narrator is the heartless boy who forces his girlfriend into a teenage pregnancy and then rejects his best friend when it's revealed that he's gay (Joe, the burly volunteer, almost choked when delivering this confession). Perhaps the best moment of all comes when Merchant's character forces his stage girlfriend to take up smoking. His leaping about the stage to express the concept of “peer pressure” through the medium of dance is hilarious.

This whole scene shows just how good a writer Merchant is: his volunteers aren't required to do any acting to make the play comic; the concept and the lines – read straight from the page without time for rehearsal – are enough. The play (complete with the noisy moving of chairs during dramatic blackouts, just like a real school production) is quite beautifully executed with huge laughs and a great nostalgic tenderness for a more innocent age. (Andy Batten-Foster)

Copyright Andy Batten-Foster 2011