DAVID BADDIEL – MY FAMILY: NOT THE SITCOM
Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1
Opened 17 May, 2016
***

Every so often you encounter a solo show that, no matter how well written or performed, how compelling or affecting in its own right, is fairly obviously, at root, therapy for its maker.

David Baddiel’s new piece is a celebration of the awkward sides of his parents: his mother’s openness about sexual matters and her long-term affair with a golfing memorabilia trader(!), his father’s embarrassingly blunt, often insulting manner of speaking. Fundamentally, though, this is his way of coping with his mother’s death and his father’s developing dementia. On the latter score, he is disconcerted by the fact that Baddiel senior suffers from Pick’s disease, whose symptoms include inappropriate behaviour and language, so to David his father is simply becoming more definitively himself.

He rather gives the game away at the top of the show. Trying to find a way into his real material, he remarks that anger “turns up the volume on who we are” and observes that the angriest place these days is the Internet, but this phase consists of several minutes of, essentially, self-justification with reference to the selected tweets of David Baddiel. This sets the tone for the next 80-odd minutes of performance: it’s observation of his parents’ behaviour, but more so of his own responses to it, from their frighteningly noisy lovemaking to his mother’s habit of heckling him in performance. None of this biographical data is to be questioned: he also emphasises his near-pathological aversion to lying.

Baddiel is, of course, a highly intelligent man; he’s very handy as regards the British awkwardness with the concept of the “public intellectual” – better to have a comedian in such a role. He is, in fact, more articulate than he pretends to be: words such as “meticulous” or “ashen” aren’t especially arcane, but he deploys them with surgical precision, intensifying an anecdote’s effect by use of the absolute mot juste. As a comic, too, he is experienced and skilled, with deft use of callbacks in the latter stages of the show. Above all, it’s clear why he needed to tell these stories. What’s not clear is why we need to hear them.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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