Holly Williams gets a double helping of comic poetry from the two young wordsmiths
Luke Wright’s Petty Concerns sees the comic performance poet examining his own 'hubris and humility'. His entertaining introduction sets the scene for blistering poems that spear his own – and our wider society's – obsession with fame.
While warning against the perils of ego surfing (googling your own name), Wright is bluntly open about his need for adoration and applause, and much of the comedy arises from him shamefacedly pointing out how, as a poet, he doesn’t receive much of either. From a cheeky teenager mocking the tightness of his skinny jeans (which make him look ‘like a blancmange skewered on tweezers’) to a bored Guardian's sports writer branding him a 'foppish buffoon', Wright happily serves up his humiliation for our enjoyment. A trawl through some devastatingly awful teenage poetry, with punctuation errors left in and rubbish rhymes ridiculed, is a highlight, but pretty much every offering includes perfect observations or giggle-prompting lines.
The stand up elements are supported by projections of particularly choice/bloody embarrassing quotes, but his poems frequently stray from the self-deprecation and satire into something altogether more poignant. A Hoxton Hipster turned Mondeo Man, Wright’s poems wittily lampoon his former pretensions and trendiness, but he also isn’t embarrassed to reveal larger lessons learnt:
‘Maybe it’s because I drive a Mondeo
and have started wearing trousers that fit
that I’ve realised that we do not die
with our affectations; if anything we live’
And this is no mumbled abashed poetry reading: Wright is a consummate performer, there's a rhythm and a pulse that’s almost musical in his delivery, which gives it a breathless, zingy energy. The poetry/stand up combo, which might not sound entirely promising, turns out to be a winning formula, and ensures Wright's concerns don't feel too petty at all.
The rather small audience return after an interval for Ross Sutherland’s show, The Three Stigmata of Pacman. Sutherland has a quicksilver intelligence – he slides between self-deprecating tales of losing his job and moving back in with his parents to sharply spat performance poetry, to surreal re-writes of doom-casting tabloids, fairy tales and his own failure to get served alcohol in Spar. 
Ross Sutherland
The show is loosely held together with the narrative of a year-in-his-life, and his creation of a time capsule (ironically, a crap plastic bin with Time Capsule scrawled on it) in which he puts things he'd like to take into the future. But Sutherland, a little shambolically, almost without you realising it, takes you by the hand and fully draws you into his own fiercely original view of the world (sometimes resembling the eight megapixel computer game of the title).
Occasionally it feels a little too rough around the edges, and tonight over-ran slightly, but I’m betting the show will gel during the run. When Sutherland is in pure poetry mode, it's never less than exhilarating, somehow both unabashedly earnest and bullshit busting. And the ticket price would be worth it alone for his brilliant rewrite of Red Riding Hood, in which each proper noun is replaced by the one 23 places below it in the dictionary. Whether this self-imposed rule is really followed or artistically tweaked seems unimportant – it might sound like sterile experiment in wordsmithery, but the only thing dry about it is Sutherland's delivery. The overall effect is really, honestly, very funny indeed.
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