The Run and Only.


Today was spent getting ‘My Part in His Downfall’ back into some sort of vague shape to be filmed at the Hitchin’s Market Theatre on Thursday.

It’s strange running it on my own again after a month of doing it in front of an audience; when you write a stand-up show you spend a lot of time talking to yourself, but it doesn’t truly come alive until you have a room of people to tell it to; it’s then that it starts to make sense.

I felt that with this show particularly as it’s ostensibly quite different to my other ones, though this might not be obvious at first glance. While the format’s the same, the subject matter is a lot more personal and my approach to the material is lighter than my first three shows, which were more aimed at the outside world than at me and had more attack. I wasn’t even aware of this myself really until I started doing it with an audience with the songs added to the mix.

My only concern about Thursday is that I’ll end up doing a Chinese Whispers-style approximation of what it was in Edinburgh through misremembering it; I find it hard to judge if this is the case or not at the moment as the lack of a reaction can make it all feel a bit cold. Hopefully putting in front of an audience again will give it a bit of kick, but worse-case scenario if it ends up being a bit rough around the edges I can treat the resulting footage as a record of the show so I don’t forget it; anything better than that will be a bonus as then I’ll be able to use the video as a way to show what I can do to industry types without having to have them turn up.

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