Review: An Evening With Charles Quaterman For One Hour, The Bill Murray

If you’ve ever been delighted by a vicious insult from what you believe to be a French stand-up comedian, there’s a very high chance you’ve seen Marcel Lucont on stage. The creation of the Buckinghamshire-bred comedian and actor Alexis Dubus, the suave Lucont has, for over a decade and a half, delivered time and again and received rave reviews for his shows, CDs and book.

During that time, Dubus has performed stand-up as himself as well, including the superb 2014 show Cars And Girls, which began as a series of true travel tales before being adapted into a fifty-minute poem. Yet to my knowledge, Charles Quaterman is only the second time that Dubus has performed as a completely different character. Quaterman’s meek, dry humour is almost the opposite of Lucont’s. Though one major aspect they have in common is that a notable chunk of their shows involve the reading of poems, and here, if it’s not poems, it’s also stories from a number of autobiographies.

Quaterman not only looks like a character from a Wes Anderson film, with his enormous hair hidden under a hat, beatnik style glasses and a largely quizzical reaction to the audience’s response to his material, but he sounds exactly like one too. It’s not just the lilting West Coast accent either, Quaterman speaks in a deliberately gentle manner, taking care to clearly enunciate every single syllable. The content is pleasingly eccentric, whether in poem or prose form. These are narratives about a life lived in an extremely particular way, with a lot of the humour derived from the minutiae of scenarios. There is also a fair amount of subtle word play, but unlike LuCont, the jokes aren’t ever signposted. They’re just lightly dropped in every once in a while, and if they do get a big laugh, the author only ever seems surprised.

It does feel like the hour needs a little more variation. The poems and prose don’t feel particularly different, and often it’s only their length that highlights the disparities. Plus, while it’s consistently enjoyable to hear the quaint, outlandish daftness that Quaterman expresses, after a while it feels a little predictable. You might not be able to guess how a story will end, but you will be able to predict when it’ll take an unusual swerve.

This is a very early outing for the character, and I’ve been so impressed with Dubus’s shows in the past that I’d be amazed if this doesn’t also become something quite unique. Quaterman is already a memorable creation, and the bones of the character are in place and show so much potential. All they need now is to be experimented with and fleshed out a little further.

Written & Performed by Alexis Dubus

An Evening With Charles Quaterman For One Hour has completed its run at The Camden Fringe