Review: Simon Munnery - Hats Off to the 101ers, and other material

Review: Simon Munnery - Hats Off to the 101ers, and other material

12 January, 2012
by: Stevie

Simon Munnery's new show encompasses bubble hats, bad guitar riffs and a musical about the R101 British airship, amongst other things. Stevie Martin is charmed. 

Simon Munnery has the uncanny ability to articulate things you hadn't realised you'd noticed. Even the simplest observations are intelligently skewed while he smiles like an English professor, driven slightly bonkers after inhaling whiteboard markers. Hats off to the 101ers is Munnery's one-man variety show; a range of poems, songs, anecdotes and monologues in a fractured, scatty format that works in his favour. If one poem isn’t to your taste, how about a six minute musical about the R101 British airship completed in 1929 delivered wearing a large top hat that emits bubbles. There is no theme either, and why should there be? Munnery is here to make you laugh.

Often described as surreal and absurd, some of his material is certainly odd, but he never disappears completely into the realm of the Mental. His more bizarre poems are usually grounded with some sort of familiar theme and, if not, his penchant for a witty turn of phrase ensures he's never kooky for kookiness sake, but the set is shot through with a playful silliness and a love of words that's great to watch.

Delivering the poems, songs and gags so rapidly some lines are occasionally missed, the sudden flights of fancy that apparently seize Munnery make it occasionally impossible to tell what is scripted, and what has just occurred to him. It's like a cross section of a mind through a kaleidoscope, and he see-saws through anecdotes, sometimes for a moment too long before delivering an unpredictable punchline pulling you straight back in.

There’s also some good use of voice looping equipment, especially in a fairly spot on poem introduced as “what London would say if it could speak”. These are punctuated by his own experiences, from witnessing two foul mouthed schoolgirls to a quick rewriting of the UK’s leading supermarket slogans. Some of his lines may zip by before registering, but it all amounts to an undercurrent of acute intelligence beneath the bubbly top hat. Which is, in itself, a feat of engineering.

An inspired cardboard animation sequence is the highlight for most of the audience, if a little overlong, but it's tantamount to Munnery's strength as a performer that, even when he confuses himself and has to go and grab a script, he is forgiven. If the animation didn't do it for you, then the opening lecture on Woman Studies that follows certainly will. It's a character comedy barrage of outrageous sexism delivered by a deliberately chauvinistic arsehole ("...which leads me to my next topic: Should Women Be Allowed To Raise Children?") so exaggerated and dense with wordplay it's impossible not to be impressed. A few women in the audience don't get it, perhaps they are offended, but Munnery gently explains some of the jokes afterwards. He shouldn't have to, but this further demonstrates one of his strengths- his likeability factor. He even gets an “awww” when asking people if they’d like to buy his DVD. Primarily though, and thankfully, he is bloody funny.

Simon Munnery is at the Soho Theatre until Saturday 14th January.

www.sohotheatre.com 

Stevie