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Pleasance Courtyard – Pleasance Below
This comedian blends styles to tackle big topics in mental health, but it struggles to keep us laughing.Summary
Rating
Ok
This is the show that trigger warnings were made for. Rich Hardisty has been through a lot. Anorexia, bipolar and borderline personality disorders, self-harm, and heroin abuse. He is, in his own words ‘clinically mad’ and this show walks his audience through his history with mental health.
This is a very impersonal show about personal issues, Hardisty can knowingly take a view with hindsight and disconnect. He is very self-aware but perhaps isn’t aware of his audience. He reminds us a few times that ‘it’s ok laugh’ without quite providing us with any funny material. At points his routines are just a compilation of uncomfortable stories and 80s references that sub in for jokes.
There are good potential shows peeking out in Silly Boy but none come to fruition. Hardisty is clearly a good comedian but has written a bit of a bum show that doesn’t quite know what it wants to do. We’re shown a funny series of slides about Hardisty tracking down his estranged Dad through quite a amusing series of events; I hope he can develop this from eight seconds to an hour.
His style is light and anecdotal, and his topics are bleak – he’s in the key of Russell Howard but playing one of Richard Gadd’s tunes. It’s an important challenge to present this material but it’s also important to form it into a coherent and funny show. There are funny surreal asides about depressed peacocks and clever call-backs to rollerblading. It’s a bit of a mishmash of styles that’s hard for the audience to follow as there’s little continuity – is he a surrealist, a story-teller or a documentary comedian? Which bits are the funny bits? He expects us to laugh at him, but we’d rather laugh with him.
At the 40-minute point the show comes to a natural end, where Hardisty then performs a dance to some flashing images from film and TV from the 80s to the present day, a means of explaining what it’s like to be in a manic phase followed by a very funny, tightly written and performed conversation with a god-like figure.
By no means is this a miserable hour, it’s just not a consistently funny one. Hardisty presents promise, but this might be one to miss right now.
Written by: Richard Hardisty
Produced by: Mick Perrin and PBJ Management
Rich Hardisty: Silly Boy plays at EdFringe 2022 until 29 August. Further information and bookings here.
