Review by Julia Chamberlain

Russ Powell is a likeable blokey bloke, at ease with himself and with a small crowd. He made a connection with each person in the front row, even picking out someone he was pretty sure he’d met before.

Powell may be able to do this stand-up lark, but there is more to it than confidence, a lack of embarrassment and enough self-belief to  keep yapping for an hour.  Like a seasoned pro, he delivered three routines ‘to find the level’, each one worse than the last.  He’s a young man, why doesn’t he know that Aids jokes have not been acceptable among professionals since God was a boy? To use one as a barometer  for the room is barrel-scraping low.  I‘m sure there was no malice, but ignorance is no excuse.  

Same goes for the – yawn – rape jokes later.  The funniest bloke in the office  (apologies to  Omid) is doing a show and it’s a cruel example of  deluded  desire and ambition that  he’s actually got it here.

He’s young, he can learn to do better, but this is show is  ill-advised.  It’s a first hour when he hasn’t got 20 minutes – and in fairness he’s certainly not alone up here – but to be in the Pleasance among the great and good, or even the average, with this offering is brutal.  Somebody’s taken his money but there’s not been much advice or counsel.  

This show is not without virtue: he does have some amusing phrasing dotted through, but the main currency of this show is very basic, hacky men  ‘n’ women, cats ‘n’  dogs, French and American stereotyping, you will have heard it all before.  The fragments that are original aren’t so bad, but he doesn’t have enough of them yet for a set, never mind a show.

He understand what’s supposed to happen; there’s a decent structure to the show finishing with a run of callbacks and a very cheap pay-off directed to the chap in the front row he’s supposed to have recognised. It does pull it  together, but there’s nothing subtle, smart or original here.  Shame.

Review date: 15 Aug 2013
Reviewed by: Julia Chamberlain