Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Vaunted on the Welsh comedy circuit but little known east of Offa’s Dyke, stand-up veteran Tudur Owen this year offers a delightful fable in praise of the advantages of laziness.

He’s a compelling storyteller, holding the room with his understated delivery and able to make real the cast of quirky characters in this extended, warm-hearted yarn. I have no idea whether the narrative is true or not, but you certainly want it to be.

It revolves around a local character in the Anglesea village where Owen grew up who went by the monicker Alive Huw – a wry nickname, earned because two Huws from there went off to fight in the Second World War, but only he returned.

That peculiar sense of dry humour helps give this story a  powerful, almost mythical, sense of place. Owen contrasts the sleepy villagers with ‘wakey’ tourists, bustling with activity and buying up holiday homes. Huw was definitely in the sleepy camp, doing as little as humanly possible to get through the day. Owen claims he had figured out how to save the world – but just ‘couldn’t be arsed’ to do it.

There’s a zen-like quality to the way our hero would do nothing and need nothing, a karmic state that threatened to be undone when he won £1.2million on the lottery. And that’s just the first of many twists in this compelling yarn, as he spends his windfall in an unexpected way – ending up with a dramatic showdown in London.

The inherent Welshness of the story is extended by some amusing side routines about the close-knit nature of the population or the way the language differs from English, including the fact that it has more vowels. Do your research, hack comedians… Such material is a taste of home for the sizeable Welsh contingent in the room, but it lands for the rest of us, too, as he always keeps it interesting.

Such digressions offer some texture to the hour, but never take us too far from following the unfolding Alive Huw saga, which we follow with rapt attention. By turns, it is outlandish, tender and philosophical. For is the man with no ambitions any less happy than the man who lives in endless pursuit of his? 

But neither of them are probably happier than the man who’s just walked out of this delightful and funny show.

• Tudur Owen: Alive Huw is on at Just the Tonic at The Mash House at 5.55pm

Review date: 23 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Just the Tonic at The Mash House