I like Amy Wright. She’s cute, self-deprecating and instantly loveable. Unfortunately, she’s just not that funny. Occupied purports to be a show about what Wright has been doing in the three years since she quit her job – ‘occupying herself with poetry, songs, and props’, and paying a little too much attention to her nephew Cameron it seems, though this does result in a brilliant visual gag when she fields him as an alternative to our current Prime Minister.
There’s some genuinely good ideas here, and Wright definitely has the charm and character to pull off a good stand-up show.
In a promising start, ex-teacher Wright hands out various classroom positions to the audience – a ‘box-monitor’ and timekeeper are appointed, and a register even does the rounds. Unfortunately these touches are never followed up on, and the show quickly loses focus. There’s a lot of rummaging in a big box of cardboard props which when they appear are rarely worth the wait. She also relies too heavily on the most well-worn cliché of the female stand-up – the lonely desperate woman routine – punctuated here by short poems about an unnamed ex.
Wright warns at the beginning that she ‘tend[s] to ramble on’, and this is the main flaw in her show. Teasing out the gems – an amusing Drum & Bass nursery rhyme, an interesting thought experiment about future job applicants having to submit Google search histories instead of CVs, and lovely running gag with a Parental Advisory sign (here’s hoping there’s always a baby in the audience) – quickly becomes tiring and when the timekeeper reveals we’re only half way through I can’t help but sink a little lower in my seat.
There’s some genuinely good ideas here, and Wright definitely has the charm and character to pull off a good stand-up show. This is her first hour though, and a preview before a longer run in Edinburgh. Perhaps the show will get tighter as she settles into it, but based on this hour I just wish she’d spent her three years off writing some actual material.
