Gig review by Steve Bennett at the Leicester Square Theatre

Life In A Goldfish Bowl is an odd choice of title for cabaret performer James Haslam’s solo show. It suggests he’s the victim of unwanted public attention – but the tone of the show screams: ‘Look at me!’ And it screams it pretty camply, too.

It is a very old-fashioned sort of performance; mixing anecdotes with songs both comic  – with a familiar music hall melody – and deadly serious, causing some abrupt gear changes. He used the old Catskills cheeseball of referring the audience as ‘ladies and germs’ maybe two dozen times, too… and your reaction to that on the endearing-irritating scale will probably determine how much you appreciate the full hour.

His extravagant personality sells this hard, pulling exaggerated reaction faces that would do a gargoyle proud. But while he’s a more-than-solid craftsman, with a singing voice that wouldn’t be out of place in a West End musical, this drama school graduate (obvs) is not doing much that’s new.

There are a lot of laboured double entendres, for instance, helped by the fact he sets the whole hour in, erm, motion with the thoughts he had while undergoing a colonic irrigation.   

It’s things like this which make him comes across as overly desperate to entertain, putting in lots of small, barely-there jokes, as if in morbid fear of telling something straight. He even uses the hoariest old heckle putdown of ‘this is what happens when cousins sleep together’ as a scripted line. And he lives up to every stereotype while reliving his adoration for Wonder Woman in the spangliest way possible, very much in the gay cabaret tradition. 

But when he lets events speak for themselves, the anecdotes have more to commend them. His yarn of being hapless and helpless, stuck inside a Dalek on a Dr Who stage show, has plenty of proper slapstick laughs, while his tale of a firearms conviction is inherently interesting, and you just want to listen.

Yet these stories tend the be overwhelmed by the more blatant performance elements which leave nothing to subtlety: for example the a song about acceptance with the trite pay-off that ‘we should all respect each other despite our differences’ has to spell it out.

There is a market for Haslam’s sort of showmanship, bold and blatant, but it seems at odds with the more straightforward, stand-up-like elements of the hour, which hint at a more natural sincerity.

Review date: 18 Jan 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett