Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall is a creative comic writer, but this show never hits its groove.

Issue one is that there’s no momentum in the material; he has three or four minute bursts of a routine before resetting the show, No segues, he’ll just stop and say: ‘Right, next bit.’ It’s a cute recognition of the shortcoming at first, but it becomes fatal for a 50-minute show.

In the same vein of sticking with something irritating, his repeated habit of having rousing music swell under crescendoing rhetoric doesn’t work, either.

The second issue is that he has a detached, inscrutable air that conveys little of the personality behind the offbeat thoughts. He might be talking about first-hand experiences such as becoming a father for the first time, but he gnerally creates little connection. 

When he tells us that he’s slobbish, or of his relationship history we not only can’t tell if the stories are true, which doesn’t really matter, we can’t even tell if it would be in keeping with his character, because we don’t know what that character is. But as awkward on stage as he professes to be in real life, he sets up roadblocks to his personality that means the audience can’t quite relax into his company.

That’s backed with a helping of go-nowhere crowd work, although a gimmick involving his girlfriend calling in is a nice bit of participation that serves to bind the room, temporarily at least.

Most of his routines are dry and quirky, but not given enough of a sell to help us invest in that reality. While at other times he can be yukky – the vasectomy section being a case in point – or take things into a dark place, even though he doesn’t really seem that kind of a comic. But what do we know?

His offbeat scenarios include a delightful story of an unusual impersonator, of complimenting his girlfriend by comparing her to Saddam Hussein, and equating pet ownership to slavery. And he has the (final) solution to the dilemma of whether you would go back in time and kill a baby Hitler.

Delightful gems of a line or phrase pepper these peculiar routines, and he’ll often spin the ideas off into some imaginative absurdity – before landing back on earth with a bang as he runs out of steam. If only he could maintain the impetus he only temporarily creates, this could be a neat little show.

Review date: 15 Apr 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett