Review by Steve Bennett

Chris Addison’s recent forays into television have been mixed, to say the least. In fact, it’s hard to square his naturalistic performance in the sublimely vicious The Thick Of It with his childishly surreal – and little-mourned – sitcom Lab Rats.

Such endeavours have kept him away from the live stage for the past five years or so – though by his assured performance in this new tour you wouldn’t know it. The only change since he’s been away is where once he revelled in the high-concept, meticulously structured show, this is a looser affair with no grand theme. Maybe some audiences would have baulked at attending comedy nights entitled Atomicity or Civilization – even though the charming Addison was never as highbrow as the titles might have suggested.

He is, however, unmistakably an archetypal middle-class liberal Englishman. If the Guardian Society section had human form, it would be Chris Addison; the only difference being that the newspaper supplement is thick with advertising, and Addison is breakably thin.

That he’s no sportsman comes as no surprise, but the ‘revelation’ inspires one of the best parts of the show. Anyone who was always among the last picked for school teams will identify with his brilliantly self-deprecations of his humiliations in the remedial PE set; while the jocks can simply laugh at his physical incompetence.

His typically English hang-ups – particularly about sex – also provide a running theme; the act being a tedious, necessary duty to be performed before Cranford comes on. In this, and so often in the show, it’s the perfect eloquence of the language he uses that generates the laughs.

It’s backed up with a big performance, making expert use of those gangly limbs. At times, it’s a little too falsely exaggerated – especially when combined with his occasional habit of sniggering at his own gags – but generally it injects a useful physicality into a passionate performance. Meek reserve, at least on stage, is the only one of his class traits that he doesn’t display.

Addison uses that energy to rail furiously against the BNP and the Catholic church, but he’s not an explicitly issue-driven comedian, and his Pope material is much better when he’s being surreal, rather than opinionated. Indeed, it’s funnier still when he directs his rage at less deserving targets, such as wearers of Ugg boots. What could be more middle-England than whinging at the inconsequential?

Addison has pop at that, too, in the closest this show comes to a theme: that despite living in an age of unprecedented convenience, we – and especially the media – love to moan that the country’s going ‘to hell in a handbasket’ at any minor irritation. Just look at the hysterical overreaction to one day of snow, he points out.

This all gets plenty of laughs of recognition from an audience that seems as broadly middle-England as Addison himself. Indeed, when a reference to E4’s Skins – the drama in which Addison plays the uptight headmaster – comes up, it sails over the heads of all but a small gaggle of youngsters.

Although he doesn’t look it, Addison is now 38 and a new father. Naturally that means he talks about children a bit, even though he presciently acknowledges that it’s a subject almost guaranteed to prove a turn-off. A couple of other items in this grab-bag of routines don’t quite soar either; but it’s never a slog, just a more relaxed pace before another onslaught of Addison’s prime material, worth the five-year wait.

Review date: 23 Feb 2010
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Nottingham Playhouse