Review by Paul Fleckney

It’s one thing an audience not enjoying a show, but when the performer starts showing the strain, you know you’re in trouble.

Towards the end of his performance, Dave Lemkin is trying to prize some banter out of the audience. I don’t think he wants much, just something. Anything. A sign of life. But it’s not happening. You’d find more chemistry in a hospice.

Frustrated, he starts trying to joke his way out of it, speculating about whether the audience has been bussed in from a mental hospital. It’s one of several wild swipes he makes. They’re made in jest, and they’re taken in jest, but there’s no mistaking how utterly fucked off he is with the situation. It’s pure Brent, insulting your audience when the gags bomb.

I feel for Lemkin, genuinely. He’s fought gamely to make the Lower Swell Summer Festival 2016 work. But had it been a real-life festival, the marquee would have been silently taken down after lunch. He presented to us four main characters: the local vicar (Peter Church), a management training consultant (Colin Jackson), the local toff and former cabinet minister (Dickie Daventry), and the local yoga teacher (Jacqueline du Lait).

The weakness of the material and the amateurism was such that I have no choice but to give this one star. At one point he even brought out a puppy – an actual, live puppy – and it’s still getting one star. Have you any idea how much I like puppies?

The idea presumably was to cast a wry eye over rural, religious England and its merry band of eccentrics, a sort of Vicar of Dibley in sketch form (and no cherry-picking that for an out-of-context quote). I don’t know how many other ways I can say this, but the script was just really bad. Peter Church’s breathy vicar patter was an accurate lampoon but he had a joke-less set. Colin Jackson was a vague and flabby pop at management bullshit. Dickie Daventry was a generic toff with no antenna for political comedy (pretending to be Margaret Thatcher’s ex-lover is a singularly uninspired idea, and blaming her for austerity is like blaming Caesar for high immigration). Jacqueline du Lait was just a lazy excuse to camp it up and sexually harass the audience (perhaps that’s what this was all about). The transitions from one character took so long, you’d have time to watch the 1981 ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited in its entirety.

The last refuge of the dying comic is to lean heavily on the audience. Return time after time to a couple of individuals. Create the illusion of substance. And that’s where we ended up. But it was no use. By the end, I just wanted to see the puppy again.

Lower Swell Summer Festival 2016 really is a fete worse than death.

Review date: 11 Aug 2016
Reviewed by: Paul Fleckney
Reviewed at: Ciao Roma