In an interview with Katerina Partolina Schwartz Harry Stachini talks about making his Edinburgh Fringe debut with his show Grenade about what it means to pull the pin.
What is your elevator pitch?
In a nutshell, I would summarise it as, it is about family, it is about honesty and it is about relationships. So, a grenade is a metaphor for a problem in your life that you know you're not dealing with; you can hold on to it, or you can pull the pin and see what happens. The theme of it is honesty, and how that looks in different parts of life, whether that be family, or relationships. And I suppose as well, the relationship you kind of have with yourself, because it can be very easy to lie to yourself and tell yourself everything's absolutely fine. But what that looks like further down the line, you don't know.
What is the grenade a metaphor for?
I’ve not like crowbarred a message into the show. It doesn't just have to be in a relationship.it could be your job. It could be your family, it could be whatever area of your life. It's just that thing that you know isn't right, but you just go, “I'll deal with that later”. When people have spoken to me, they've shared different parts of their lives, which is quite interesting, because they've watched you for an hour and they kind of feel like they've got an idea of who you are, which they do in a snapshot, but they don't obviously know you, but they feel comfortable. It's amazing how comedy can do that.
What are you looking forward to about making your debut?
I'm really proud of the show and I'm excited to be doing it in a bigger room with the Underbelly. So, I'm looking forward to seeing how the show is going to land day to day. Because when I've previewed it, and I've done the material in comedy clubs, the one thing I've loved most about the stand-up is the level of honesty that exists in the room, because every crowd is different, every gig is different. And there's no other art form that has the relationship between crowd and performer like stand-up. Because when you watch music, everyone watches it ias the audience, like Coldplay the other day at Glastonbury; everyone's clapping and you've got 80,000 people together. But when you watch comedy, what you laugh at is different from what I laugh at. And that's what makes it the individual experience.
How did you find yourself doing comedy?
Stand-up kind of came about when I was at uni. I was at John Moores University in Liverpool, and I was studying sports coaching with the idea of being a PE teacher. That was what I got told from like, the age of, I'd say, 15 onward. There are three teachers in my family. But teaching is very much like a 'career'. When I was at uni, I enjoyed it as an experience, but didn't necessarily buzz off my course.
Before dropping out, I ended up bumping into a lad called Ben Bossward. I've only met this guy twice. He was in a smoking area, and he was outside the uni block. We got chatting. He said, “What's your study? You should just do stand-up". And, you know, we'd had a bit of back and forth. It's not like he immediately went, “You should go and do this". But after that, I literally like rang a comedy club: Hot Water, in Liverpool! In fact, I did a six-week comedy course with them. And then from there, it just kind of, it just took off.
I did my first gig at 18, but I'd say I properly like started in February 2019. And yeah, I saw Ben about six months after doing my first gig. And I was like, "By the way, I'm now doing stand-up as a result of a conversation I had with you in a smoking area" So, a bit barmy, you know, someone says you should do this, and you go, “I'll give it a go". I have no clue what Ben's doing these days, but I do hope he's well.
