Nick Revell has honed his comic storytelling craft to a fine point. Over the course of the hour, Revell delivers one elaborate and cumulatively expanding fantastical narrative from his past year, broadly structured around a journalism assignment for Hello magazine that he picked up in a North London pub, requiring flight out to the unmapped Eurasian region of Transoxania.
Watching Nick Revell spill forth sentence after sentence of elaborately constructed chronicle is a delight
To do true justice to the plotline of the bizarre and packed storyline is far outside the constraints of this review. The story mushrooms to involve talking Bactrian camels lamenting the demise of the Silk Road, imprisoned dictatorial PR assistants, pheromone-wild wild animals, and a super-strength Sour Diesel strain of marijuana. Just the very fact that Revell has memorised and delivers at rapid pace this tale of intrigue and mystery is deserving of praise. Watching him spill forth sentence after sentence of elaborately constructed chronicle is a delight in itself.
There are a few parts of the story that didn’t quite seem to make sense, and we found ourselves debating after the show quite what role the plot-pivotal moths were actually supposed to have played. Such is the pace that there is intentionally not time to digest all the aspects of the story. Perhaps with slightly slower moments built later into the show, after the crescendo at the beginning has been completed, the audience would have had more chance to refocus mental attention at all points. As it was, there are moments when you find your mind wandering, unable to keep up with all the nuances of the story mountain that Revell has built. Nevertheless, allowing the detail to wash over you, turning your mind back to appreciate an elegantly conducted pun that has flown by, is the best way to appreciate his skill.
Sit back, relax and let Revell frantically show you round this fractal of a story.
