Live at the Globe with Dara O Briain, review: jokes good, bard and ugly at the oldest comedy venue of all
“Now is the winter of our discontent,” cried Dara Ó Briain, hobbling around the stage with a wicked glint in his eye. The hobble was, sadly, not part of the Richard III impression. A bit of knee-trouble meant the Mock the Week star took the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe on Monday with a cane and a “Willy Wonka vibe”, the subject of some entertaining stick schtick. (He’d hoped a bespoke walking stick would make him look sophisticated; instead, he looks like “the old man from Up”.)
After a year of online gigs and soulless drive-in shows (“like giving a political rally to Autobots”), the Irish comedian was clearly thrilled to be treading the boards of an actual theatre – and this theatre in particular, ending his set with one of Hal’s soliloquies from Henry IV, just for the hell of it. But that excitement came slightly to the detriment of his comic timing, as Ó Briain gabbled through his material at a rate of knots.
The Globe has enviable acoustics, but I was left cupping my ears. It’s a shame, as much of his set was excellent, in particular a bit about being so disappointed with a telescope he bought in lockdown that he disowned everything he’d ever said on Stargazing Live: “They’re just f---ing dots”.
The rest of the line-up were hit-and-miss. I’m usually a fan of Jen Brister’s bristling-with-rage comedy, but, as the evening’s host, her observations about Zoom quizzes and video-call filters felt stale after being tackled by every other comedian over the past year. A gag about incompletely waxed genitals resembling “an ageing Hasidic Jewish man”, meanwhile, struck me as more tasteless than funny.
Radio 4 star Athena Kogblenu made a likeable appearance, but the unexpected highlight was Nina Conti, who lured a couple of groundlings onto the stage for some of her signature human ventriloquism. It’s a bit she’s been doing for years, but still a clever and original idea: volunteers don masks with moving lips that (through a clever gizmo) she can manipulate at arms’ length, their awkward body language adding to the mirth as they react to Conti’s words coming out of their own mouths.
That her audience interaction went down so well was a reminder that the Globe is a brilliant space for comedy. It’s more intimate than most venues of its size, with a frisson that comes from blurring the line between performer and public, as punters happily lean with their elbows up on the stage. I could hardly believe this was the first stand-up gig there in two decades (following a Billy Connolly show in 2001): it should be a monthly event.
The original Globe was, arguably, the place that cemented the image of the modern comedian. You can draw a line from today’s stand-ups to Robert Armin, who joined Shakespeare’s company around the time they moved to the Globe in 1599. As Feste in Twelfth Night and Touchstone in As You Like It, Armin turned the “clown” from a bumbling yokel we laugh at into a sharp-witted social commentator we laugh with.
But enough bardolatry. Conti’s winningly foul-mouthed puppet sidekick, Monkey, was far from reverential about Shakespeare’s oeuvre. After all, he pointed out, “with a couple of friends and some typewriters, I could write that s---.”
