Micky Flanagan at Soho Theatre

Micky Flanagan at Soho Theatre

21 July, 2008
by: Joe Harrod

At the Soho Theatre Micky Flanagan has the audience in stitches for well over the promised hour with a potted history of his rise from Billingsgate Fish Porter to Dulwich property owner and father. He delivers a brilliant, understated monologue with a message about trying, and trying again, to make a life worth living, and some hilarious and ultimately unimportant mistakes along the way.

More than that, he makes your correspondent feel old. (At 28, and with a broody girlfriend, I'm the Spoonfed grandpa anyway.) I've seen Mickey three times in the past decade. The first time, he was moaning about his first serious girlfriend and her habit of stacking decorative stones on his VCR. The second time, he was contemplating his first mortgage. This show is the denouement, as he would have it: Micky is now a father, a valid property owning member of the middle classes who has to sneak out for fried chicken to commune with the kids from the wrong side of the tracks.

Of course, this means I'd seen two thirds of the show before. But it doesn't matter. Every joke has been refined for the monologue, all the material is dynamite, and this is a hugely engaging story. Micky is a gentle, happy man, but he also retains the cocksure strut of the 17 year old youth pictured on the backdrop of the theatre. Half the show is about what a catch he was in the era of Luther Vandross. The other half is about how cool he is, even now.

There's a lot of rude sex material such as a comparison between militant feminist 70s vaginas ("you've only got her pants halfway down and it comes growling over the top GRRR!") and the more placid, happy within themselves noughties model. ("Come in, have you seen my haircut?") However the show is also about education, growth and empathy. Laugh out loud, thought provoking and heart warming – all from a typical, rather unreformed laddish geezer and self styled heartbreaker.

Micky Flanagan has come a long and entertaining road and his observations on life and growth will send you into the night with a broad smile and a few dreams of your own.

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Joe Harrod