‘Just had a moment of self-awareness there,’ Ryan Withers stopped halfway through a joke to announce. ‘I’m on stage as a woman.’ The young Australian seems almost as confused as we are as to why. There is a lack of certainty and self-assuredness to his Edinburgh debut that masks an otherwise strong hour of comedy.
He scuttled in five minutes after the show was due to start, asking for the time and apologising. He then spent the first few minutes apologising in advance for a shambolic show. The way it was delivered, almost certainly none of this was planned. Or if it was, such an excuse-filled, self-deprecating opener is surely a sign of nerves. He was then thrown by a faulty microphone and took a while to really get going.
When he did though, there were some excellent moments. He begins with ‘the end of the show that people might have been expecting’ to get it out of the way and it is an entertaining subversion of typical drag acts, which Withers is certainly not. He has a tendency to drag jokes on for too long, however, continuing beyond the last laugh, another sign of inexperience.
There are more good ideas which are also misjudged in their execution: a Q&A with the audience where the questions are prerecorded could be hilarious, but his answers are too obvious; his impressions of film stars are unexpectedly superb but again he gets carried away by the audience’s laughter and keeps it going far too long.
His songs, from predicting his future as a drag act in Russia to a melodramatic gothic ballad, are the highlight – the fact that they are self-contained means he knows when to stop and he is really very good when limits are imposed. With a little more experience and discipline, Withers will definitely be one-to-watch.
