OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, 25 September 2008

Dylan Moran

I’D HAD my ticket for Moran’s show stuck to the fridge for months. I’m not sure why I chose the fridge apart from the fact that I’m in there every day and if it went missing I’d notice. The purpose of the fridge ploy was to ensure that there was no way I could miss the show, it was such a rare opportunity to see a comedian of Moran’s status in the intimate atmosphere of the One Touch Theatre. On Thursday night, with rapidly beating heart, I took the ticket to Eden Court, remembering to detach it from the fridge first, and it worked, they let me in!

The show had been sold out for months and the theatre was packed to the roof when Moran shambled on to the stage at the start of his act. The audience responded to him instantly and so, needing no warm up, Moran launched into a frantic pace of comic anecdotes, many relating to his problems with being a middle aged father. Moran is not a gag teller, he weaves together complex reflections on life and it is the images that he conjures up that create his humour.

In an earlier age Moran would have been a poet, and there is a great deal of poetry in his comedy as he takes great delight in his playful use of language. There is something of Byron in his tousle haired appearance and something of Tommy Cooper in his awkward, fidgety stage presence. Like Cooper, he is constantly in motion on the stage with a clumsiness that makes you think he has only just take possession of his body and hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet.

Like all great comedy his humour starts from profound and sometimes dark observations that he turns into superb comic stories that leave the audience gasping for breath. Moran’s intelligence shines through his comedy and the enthusiastic response of the audience proves that the mixture of poet and comedian is a potent one.

Laughter, like pain, has no memory. An indication of good comedy is that, after the performance, you can remember laughing but you can’t remember what you were laughing at. It’s also evidence of a good performer that time seems to shrink. The first thirty minutes of Moran’s gig seemed to pass in about five minutes and he only seemed to have stepped on the stage for a moment before we were out in the foyer queuing for drinks.

This is in stark contrast to some of my early performances in late night Fringe venues where five minutes seemed to stretch out endlessly and the river of time appeared to slow almost to a trickle. Moran’s comedic talents had the opposite effect, however, as he appeared to float from one chaotic thought to the next.

The impression that his material simply drifts into his mind is an erroneous one, as what appears on stage is carefully crafted and refined. I once saw him backstage at The Stand, scribbling bizarre thoughts on to the back of his hand, before he went out in front of the audience to road test his ideas.

I think that no one in the capacity audience can have left the theatre without feeling that they had witnessed a brilliant comedian at the top of his game. I was still laughing as I drove home and it was good to see a comedian who was not afraid to deliver intelligent humour that didn’t rely on shock tactics or obscenity to get laughs.

T S Eliot was a great fan and close friend of Groucho Marx. If the poet had been in the audience at Eden Court on Thursday night I think he would have been pleased with the performance, and perhaps left the theatre wondering just how good a poet Moran could have been.

© John Burns, 2008

Links

• Eden Court Theatre
• John Burns at Purple Comedy