After winning last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award, Russell Kane’s marriage fell apart, he had a breakdown, and didn’t perform for a considerable part of the year. The show that he brings back to the Fringe this year tracks the rise and fall in his personal life across the year through a general frame of ‘manscapes’ – a series of postures that are expected of men in general.It is an interesting premise, and one that leads itself to a fascinating deconstruction of the nature of boyish awkwardness and ‘macho’ posturing, set alongside his own personal anecdotes that fall into these shapes. Compared to the host of eager, identikit men on the stand-up circuit, trading anecdotes like a mate down the pub whilst maintaining an alienating distance from actual audience interaction (see Russell Howard), this is bold and provocative new territory. It is interesting to see how these complex ideas work with success in such a large room – grounded as they are in Kane’s trademark mix of powerful charisma and devastating emotional honesty. Watching someone alternating between pirouetting around the stage impersonating Cheryl Cole and lying in a foetal position recalling breaking down on his mother’s kitchen floor is a mesmeric experience.Kane is an incredibly intelligent and charismatic performer, but the borderline between live comedy and live therapy is so awkwardly blurred here that is hard to pinpoint how much of it really promotes proper unselfconscious laughter. Extended anecdotes about a failed one-night stand and an altercation in a first-class carriage, bringing his class-consciousness bubbling to the fore include brilliantly funny details, but the laughs arise from mining Kane’s own neuroses and self-loathing. This is no bad thing – in fact it should be welcomed for its daring and invention in pushing a traditional anecdotal style far further than a ‘Live at the Apollo’ audience would otherwise be taken.The lengths that Kane goes to exemplify his own neuroticism and discomfort from which the jokes arise can sometimes make the show seem something more to admire from afar than to actually laugh with. By giving so much of himself on stage, he sometimes makes the audience feel uncomfortable in their laughter. It is this willingness to create discomfort that seals Kane’s stature as a comedian who can combine broad accessibility with challenging and complex ideas on an impressive scale.
