Gig review by Steve Bennett at The Temple

Pearse James has the unhinged, unfocussed intensity of a drunk relentlessly accosting you in a local bar.

Looking dishevelled and slightly seedy, his comedy is something of a haphazard download of surreal thoughts, unfinished arguments and boisterous physicality that’s sometimes funny, often disconcerting.

Even if the offbeat tone is set when he welcomes us as his ‘manager’ – in blonde Eighties rock perm, fake moustache and phonier Scandinavian accent – it is nothing compared to the randomness that follows. Some of the material seems rooted in common experience – website dating, Amsterdam excesses and so forth – but it tends to become derailed, either by design or because of the shambolic approach to writing that pervades the show.

You couldn’t accuse this Scottish-based Irishman of failing to be committed to the performance, after seeing him scatter furniture in his spirited dry-humping of an imaginary vaccuum cleaner, but it’s a triumph of enthusiasm over polish.

Elsewhere in the messy, surreal-tinged show, he carpet-C-bombs us with a vagina monologue of his own, regales us with a story of sex on the farm that he titles 50 Shades Of Sileage, and delivers some hip-hop-themed one-liners. None of the routines are slick, though there are often nuggets of good ideas at their heart. He gets laughs, sometimes because he’s being genuinely funny, sometimes out of nervousness for the disturbing behaviour he exhibits - for he is far from the sort of comic you could feel totally relaxed with.

Rather sensibly, he bails out of a show even he describes as ‘very unprofessional’ at around the 40 minute mark, rightly assessing that was probably the limit of audience tolerance for his uneven comedy. We’d have to go without his promised/threatened gameshow to win a packet of biscuits this time...

Review date: 6 May 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Brighton The Temple