Claire Dowie arrives in Brighton as part of a low-key tour to trial new material, and although half the potential audience may have rather pre-empted her consumer satire by swerving the ticket office, those there to bear witness are not getting out again until we’ve given feedback to her manager’s perma-smile, stationed at the exit…
“Did you enjoy it?”
Yes. Dowie engaged from entrance, straining to edge aside a clothes rack in the story of how she fell out of love with shopping. The casual, inclusive chatter of the stand-up she employs is somewhat misleading, since the whole downbeat (if increasingly weird) scenario is fictional, but her obsessive – sometimes breathless – delivery, neurotically circling her subject matter as if trying to understand it for the first time right before us means tangents always have something to loop back to.
“You thought it was funny?”
Maybe he didn’t ask this one – after all, there were regular laughs, hopefully at approximately the places they’d been expected. But the device allows me to salute (without spoiling) comic riffs on mortal dread in the Primark car park, rolling news as a kind of sinister chorus, and the fruits of dumpster diving. Finding the root of her problem in a fear of choice, ad-fed desires and supermarket superabundance complicated by the demands of healthy eating and ethical consumerism, mania sets in: “Where does an anarchist shoplift?” she yelps halfway deep, dizzy from chasing her own tail.
“How about… the serious bit?”
The smile slipped a bit here, one lip tucked neatly under the other as he confided “Birmingham weren’t sure”. What he was referring to was a sudden gear-change a third of the way through, when what seemed a comfortable, if bitter-sweet, set-up at a relative’s funeral opened instead into a long visual passage with no wish for a punchline. “That shut you up, didn’t it?” she’d joked, about-turning back into banter, but the transition – puzzling and unresolved as it may have been (a ghost, a train) is what stuck fastest. For a few minutes we left the tracks, short fuses of gags replaced by taut tightrope of monologue, her eyes wide, exposed in a way the concept shielded her from elsewhere.
What worried Birmingham intrigued Brighton – and, conversely, later junctions when things could have turned uneasily, unfunnily unreal again may have profited precisely so – reported offstage forces asking why she wasn’t spending her money squeezed for more menace, for example. One part out of key sounds like a mistake, a pattern of the same builds a theme, however unexpected and perhaps even self-destructive. The final scene made steps in the right direction. Dowie – who by now was claiming to be part of a movement – airily took responsibility for the credit crunch while dancing slowly across a stage re-imagined as empty dance floor. It’s to be hoped other audiences help hone the show ever further from topical stand-up to the unsteady lurches of humour-horror, everyday-daydream that acknowledge there’s more to this story than laughs, economy or deluxe.
kicking_k is a former staff writer and section editor of the further out, much-missed indie music monthly Plan B Magazine. Follow his realtime ‘adventures’ in the real world here: twitter.com/kicking__k Alternately, don’t.
