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There were 269 people in for Lord of the Dance Settee tonight, not at all bad for a show which I did in London only a few months ago and it was the best audience of the run so far. They were into it from the beginning and were a joy to perform for. And I think this might have been my best performance of the material so far. I hadn’t really done much of a run through (I’d half run it through in my head and out loud in the car last night, but got bored and listened to the radio instead) but I think only forgot about one line, even though sometimes it felt like I didn’t know what was coming next. It was playful and unpressured and for the first time, as I had nothing on in the theatre after me, I was able to relax, do the full show and mess about a bit. Perhaps that was the only bit of freedom lacking from this run. I still had the Edinburgh-like pressure of having to be out of the venue at a certain time, so was always aware of over-running. So tonight, with a show that I was on top of, with an audience excited and prepared to laugh, I had one of my most enjoyable performances ever. And unbelievably I have done all 11 of my existing one-man shows in the space of five weeks. I don’t know how. I really don’t. I think I might have died and this is just a dream as my brain returns to mulch.
But if not and it really happened and I am still alive, it’s been an amazing thing to do. I’ve learned a lot about myself as a person and I think also become a much better comedian over the course of all this. Or at least just by pushing myself into something clearly a bit crazy and seemingly impossible, I’ve had to really concentrate, ramp things up and improve or die (in a comedic sense). It’s utterly fucking remarkable what I’ve managed to achieve already and as my own worst critic (whose self-criticism is mediocre at best), I don’t say that lightly. And be insufferably smug if the last and most difficult challenge of this Herculean effort wasn’t still to come. I really have little idea if I am going to be capable of delivering a new hour of material tomorrow. I know I’ve got some stuff, but will I remember it, will it be enough and will it even feel anything like a show rather than a collection of half thought out ideas? Perhaps this run should have been either all my old shows OR a new show or maybe by pushing myself so hard it will be a triumph not a disaster.
The remarkable thing continues to be how unstressed i am by all this. I used most of the day to try and work on Happy Now?, but without the urgency I would be feeling with the Fringe, just calmly trying to work out what I could place where and how I might end the show and make it a whole. Every day this week I have spent about ah hour in the bath playing Addams Family Pinball on my iPad (which takes some skill just to balance the tablet in a position where it’s not going to get wet). It feels like I am wasting time, but to empty my brain and allow the cogs to turn as I half-concentrate on something else really seems to be working. It relaxes me, but also afterwards I seem to have come to some decisions or come up with a new idea.
But I don’t feel the pressure to make show 1 of Happy Now? perfect. I certainly don’t want to short change the 400+ people who are coming to see it, but I hope they will also appreciate who difficult this has all been. I hope they will be like tonight’s audience who were perhaps a little partisan, but not in a cloying or annoying way and I hope that that support will lift me to giving a strong performance of what I’ve got. We will see.
Christian Reilly and Ben Moor were at the show tonight, which made this feel like less of a one-man band and we went out for a drink afterwards in a secret bar in Leicester Square that only Ben Moor knows about somehow.
Happy Now? with the reservation of fear about tomorrow, I really think I might be.
The final table of shows was
1 Happy Now?
2 Hitler Moustache
3) Someone Likes Yoghurt
4) Oh Fuck I’m 40
5) The Headmaster’s Son
6)We’re All Going To Die!
7) The Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace
8) Lord of the Dance Settee
9) Christ on a Bike
10) Talking Cock
11) What is Love, Anyway?
12) menage a un
As Happy Now? is sold out the average ticket sales was 290 per show and the top four shows sold over 300 tickets (and the top one sold 406). Menage a un was the lowest sales with 240. I guess it would have been nice to sell about 120 more tickets over the run and averaged over 300 and it would have been amazing if I could have done all these shows to a sold out theatre, but 290 average is a lot better than I had realistically expected (I hoped all the shows might be half full and this is 70%+ average) and makes this financially as well as artistically worthwhile.
One more to go.
