I’m sat in a dark room in Camden with 20-odd random strangers and Clare Clifford is showing me close-up shots of todgers. It’s not an average way to spend a Thursday evening (at least not for this reviewer), but then this doesn’t feel like an average gig at all.
Clare got sent an unusual catalogue through the post and she’s not afraid to use it. Extensively. The ‘before and after’ shots accompanying an ad for the erectile-ly infirm was one of a cavalcade of sights and insights we were bombarded with as part of Clare’s surreal, genteel show.
An unusual, erratic affair: veering at will (and to plan, if Clare’s notes were anything to go by) between improv, observational humour, some great raconteur-ing and some not-so-great singing about colonic irrigation. The show was certainly a diverse one.
It’s not easy to stand out in stand-up and, indeed, Clare’s themes (divorce, the Olympics, masturbating pensioners) may not all be box-fresh or cutting-edge. But stand-up delivered by a ‘MAW’ (a ‘middle-aged woman’ as Clare called herself) is an interesting concept and it was when Clare told us her take on the world, rather than aping comic contemporaries, that her material shone the best.
We may have squirmed, we may have rolled our eyes but at no point were the audience doing anything other than willing Clare on to succeed. However, I’m not sure we expected the general filth Clare came out with, or that we would even have tolerated it, were it not delivered in cut-glass tones by a classically trained actress. It was a sensation no doubt similar to a vicar’s wife dropping the c-bomb during a village fete.
Despite being entitled ‘Not the Olympics’ we did get some Olympic banter early on. What we didn’t get, to this reviewer’s surprise, was any anecdotes from Clare’s long and varied career. There must be comedy gold in those hills so it was odd she chose not to mine them. Definitely a different night, if not at totally successful one.
