PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Rondo Theatre, Bath (Wed 25 Jan)

COMEDY Simon Munnery walks on stage in the dark bearing an electric guitar which he can’t play and wearing a ludicrously tall hat with bubbles coming out of the top; he proceeds to do a punk version of the story of the ill-fated R101 airship, playing guitar hopelessly badly even by punk standards. But why? Is this going to be a show worth seeing, or just embarrassing?

Why Munnery’s fascinated with the R101 isn’t clear; why the choice of the other material is so random isn’t clear either, but once you’re acclimatised to being on planet Munnery the whole wildly leftfield enterprise becomes increasingly, hysterically funny. There is a magnificent cod-academic lecture in which every bar-room anti-feminist cliché is taken so over the top that it comes back round the bottom again, and no-one will ever be able to look at a bra in the same way ever; a superbly aimed routine about the Daily Mail and what to do about it trumps every other anti-Mail rant you’ve ever heard any lefty comic do; and you may think you’ve seen all possible Bob Dylan piss-takes, but Munnery's is off the clock. And there’s an impossibly ludicrous nine-minute puppet double act of two cockney geezers at the Crucifixion.

Does this man have no boundaries? Obviously not. Is he insane, or just brilliant? Venue thinks the latter. Leaping breathlessly from topic to apparently unrelated topic, this show packs more comic ideas into an hour than most of us will see in a very long time. Classic stuff. (John Christopher Wood)

Copyright John Christopher Wood 2011