John Kearns' Dinner Party is an imaginative and raw debut hour, says Emma McAlpine.
Bad food, inane chat and a host that's lost the plot. No, it's not an episode of Come Dine With Me I'm watching, but John Kearns' Dinner Party. A largely interactive show – where the audience are the guests, Kearns is the highly-strung host and fellow comedian Pat Cahill is the light entertainment – this is an imaginative and raw debut hour from the up-and-coming comedian.
Wearing a white chef's hat, Kearns welcomes us all to his dinner before telling us the news that he is dying. Wanting to catch up with us while he still has the chance, he chats to several audience members, reliving some of his fondest memories from his formative years. This provides plenty of awkwardly comic moments as he gets the hump with ex-girlfriend 'mucky Karen' (sitting in the front row with her new boyfriend) and makes us all do the sound effects to his school 100m relay race victory.
With background mood music (the James Bond collection of course), a burnt roast, standard banter ("Has anyone read that book One Day?") and the obligatory offering of After Eight dinner mints in their "sheaths", the show is packed with amusing dinner party clichés that many will recognise.
What you’re unlikely to have encountered before is an uninvited guest like Pat Cahill, who adds a surreal boost to proceedings by performing a demented song about chicken with a traffic cone hat on his head. Undermining Kearns' stories and interrupting the flow of the dinner party, Cahill's buffoonish presence is clearly an embarrassment to our host, who gets more and more agitated as the show unravels. Their combative dynamic is unquestionably the highlight and a welcome relief to some of the more uncomfortable (albeit hilarious if you're not involved) audience participation.
As with any show relying heavily on crowd interaction, it doesn’t always work and at times it feels like it could implode at any moment, but this only adds credence to Kearns' 'character on the edge'. While the ‘party’ occasionally teeters more towards the amusingly cringe-worthy than the laugh-out-loud funny; it's a highly inventive debut from Kearns and exactly the kind of comic weirdness that you hope to see being served up at the Fringe.
John Kearn's Dinner Party is on the Free Fringe at Whistlebinkies at 4pm until Monday 29th August.
Photo credit: Darren Russell
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