Often with self-styled ‘leftfield’ comics oddity is limited to execution rather than completely disconnected content. In Terry Alderton’s case his style and material is equally capable of creating moments of imaginative brilliance and of baffling strangeness. He stalks around the stage, eyes bulging, forehead gleaming, occasionally walking around in circles when he gets particularly worked up. If a routine doesn’t go as well as he expected, he protractedly and astonishingly ‘rewinds’ his exact sounds, movements and gestures and starts again. The only thing approaching a long form structural device in the show is his repeated conversations with himself, his back turned to the audience, as he debates with a second, gravelly demon voice that criticises his choices of audience interaction and analyses what’s going wrong. It’s a brilliantly executed trick, but one that sits oddly with the material that it breaks away from. Rather than an aside, what we get is an hour and a half of asides. That’s an hour and a half, the scheduled hour dizzyingly inflated through his ceaseless improvised ramblings.
Alderton is an extremely talented, restlessly confrontational performer – whether chasing those who walk out into the street to ask them why, or rattling through mocking impressions of other, more established comedians. However, the price to be paid for these moments of brilliance are extended freeform passages which are hard to decode even as sentences, let alone routines. Sometimes his voice will remain in one accent consistently and crystallise into something approaching a ‘bit’ - as in an extended passage of dialogue between his two shoes. However, the entire gig has the sense of being improvised from nothing - exhilarating in parts, but disconnected, unstructured and baffling in others.
If you’re willing to stick with sections that feel almost like calculated misfires to ward off the uninitiated, you will find moments of real skill. I left knowing I had seen something unique, but I’m still not sure what.
