Jay Richardson reviews the second solo show from Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee 2012, James Acaster.
A patiently unfolding delight, James Acaster’s show begins with a couple of distinctly leftfield routines on his means for dealing with telesales calls, and a fiercely committed spoof of football chants, which he hammers home with such unhinged, dogged and ludicrous intensity, that his eccentricity is instantly cemented in the audience’s mind.
Everything that comes after, considerably more low-key but equally strange, fails to unsettle. So he’s freed up to get far too carried away about Pancake Day, muse on the respective weather forecasting abilities of British and Danish cows and outline his detailed research into bread, presenting his findings in a series of rudimentary charts.
As he conducts manipulative games of guess-the-number of crumbs in a Chicken Kiev, interspersing such set-pieces with moments of sharp observational humour, it’s all exceptionally varied and amusing, keeping you wondering what’s coming next. There’s certainly no sense of a pattern forming.
Arm resting nonchalantly on his mic stand, Acaster is in no hurry. He extends a metaphor of nightclub infidelity and apple orchards to a degree that veers towards patience-threatening, yet never loses sight of the goal to take the hour somewhere new and keep the crowd entertained. Other routines, like being forced to share a bed with his best friend and all the homoerotic tension that engenders, could exist in isolation as part of a club set and seem to come out of nowhere.
Gradually though, the disparate denunciations of lad culture, the endorsement of taxi-paying etiquette and the duck characterisations resolve themselves into a satisfying structure, with a succession of brilliant callbacks and a weirdly moving conclusion, his finale gaining momentum all the time. As a template for a Fringe show, it’s a novel and ambitious exercise in linking material. Ultimately, Prompt works on just about every level.
James Acaster: Prompt is at the Pleasance Courtyard at 8:15pm until Sunday 26th August
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