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Review of Preview of Headmaster's Son at XS Malarkey

Richard Herring @ XS Malarkey
Sarah Walters
2/ 7/2008

WITH Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival looming, it’s the feast before the famine for Manchester’s comedy circuit as stand-ups sharpen their anecdotes on smaller nationwide crowds.

Richard Herring is one of several comedians taking no chances, and Manchester is 14 dates into his lengthy warm-up schedule.

It’s no surprise, then, that there’s already more paper than cracks on his new show and that his opening diatribe on the comparative wonders of the Biblical ascension day is well practiced and completely arresting (“Anyone can get crucified,” he observes, “but they don’t all end up on a necklace. And anyone can come back from dead; just recently, that bloke in the canoe…”).

The big topic of his latest stand-up show, though, is growing up with the headmaster. His belief? His dysfunctional love life, his non-conventional career path and his obsession with onanism-based jokes are the inevitable, rebellious consequences of spending his home and school life under the watchful gaze of his schoolteacher father.

It was, he observes, a bit like living with a comic-book character. “But unlike Clark Kent and Superman, there was nothing to separate them. My dad wore glasses both as my dad and as the headmaster.”

He recalls his childhood dreams, reading from old diaries that expose him as a naïve – if idealistic – sex-obsessed teenager who felt he might have views as worthy as Ghandi’s and be irresistible to his older-sister’s pretty friends.

Pedantic

It’s packed with exhaustingly pedantic, but hilarious, digressions and the end result is a classic Herring dialogue with “young Richard”, where he tugs at the possibilities of what life could have been.

And there’s plenty of topics too delicate to boil down to soundbites on a family website that take equally bleak stabs at Herring’s misfiring private life.

There’s still lots of work to be done, but this is not a tentative outing. At times, Headmaster’s Son flows with mastered confidence, and when it doesn’t there’s enough flickers of brilliance in the evolving script to prove it will be one of Herring’s strongest shows yet when it opens in Edinburgh on July 31.

And yes, there’s a few grumbles at the back from those who don’t understand the dynamics of an Edinburgh preview when Herring reaches for his script. It’s their loss; under all their mumbling, they miss how engaging Herring is as storyteller alone. Perfected gags or not.