Dead Ringer For Love(ly)


Today’s show had an air of the last day of term about it, largely because I knew at least two of the three people in had seen it before at some stage other, and therefore we could all benefit from relaxing the parameters a little bit.

By rights, doing a show in such circumstances shouldn’t be fun, when the amount of people in the audience only narrowly outnumber those on stage, yet it was, with me veering off what I’d now regard as the script (not that I ever formalized it that much) to venture into unknown ground. This was particularly helped by an adlib I delivered, which I can’t for the life of me remember now, but was rightly timed at the moment. It’s a shame I can’t call it to mind now; all I can hope is it will come back tomorrow, as I think it was something that would benefit the show if it was kept in, though I may be wrong as I've no idea what I said now.

Prior to the show I got a taxi to the venue with my replacement screen in tow to discover there seemed to be no power in the space, which inevitably slowed down my set-up. Thankfully one of the crew located the problem (which was purely to do to a couple of circuit breakers that had been triggered, which is a little concerning as I don’t know what it was that caused them to trip). Once that had been found, I was back on track.

After the show, I met another (this time former) Hitchin-ite - my friend Cyndee - in the bar, who’d been in the show for the second time, having missed the beginning the other day. We had a quick drink and a catch-up before heading over to the Udderbelly on the off-chance, in the hope of catching Rory Bremner and Jan Ravens’ show; I texted Rory first thing to cheekily ask if he might be able to arrange a couple of tickets as I thought Cyndee would enjoy it being very politically-minded, and I’d hoped to see it again myself too, but had clocked the run was sold out. The fault in my plan was I’d been essentially switching from one phone-receptonless room to another from that point on, so I wasn’t sure if he’d picked up my message, or already replied.

This put me in the slightly ridiculous position of asking the box office if there happened to be any comps put by in my name, for them to discover there was, albeit just a single ticket. That was until I decided on a second whim - as the first one had already succeeded - to ask if one had been put by in Glyn’s name too, to find out there had been; it was a lovely gesture on Rory’s part, though it didn’t surprise me as he’s such a gentleman.

The show was excellent, though this was to be expected, as both Rory and Jan are outstanding at what they do. It was interesting to see what had been changed since they previewed at Mostly Comedy, particularly in Rory’s set, which contained a lot of the ideas he’d mulled over with Glyn and I when we found ourselves in the surreal position of being asked by him for feedback over a drink after his Hitchin gig. What was particularly marked that night was how much he clearly cared about getting the content right, which was inspiring, when many lesser performers might be inclined to - to some degree - phone it in, or just rely on the high standard of his impressions while paying less attention to the writing. That’s what I find so impressive about them both: their material is also top-notch.

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