Review: Frenetically funny Angela Barnes on stage at Festival Drayton Centre
How better to support the frenetically funny Angela Barnes, whose show was boldly labelled ‘Angst’, than with a laid-back warm-up from Mike Cox? His cuddly spooning with his microphone stand as he began the story of his marriage and the ever-expanding size of bed they slept in was instantly relatable and set up a string of gentle scenarios punctuated by hilarious gags.
Barnes began her set by explaining ‘This is my mid-life show, so you can relax’ and, briefly, we could. She quickly identified the youngest person in the audience and by way of explaining how communication had changed over the last three decades explained to her that ‘Ceefax was an early go at inventing the internet, but using a potato.’
She failed to find a German speaker in the audience but littered her material with humour derived, or invented, from quirks of German vocabulary (‘The German for ‘tanning bed’, she insisted, translates literally as ‘chav-toaster’’).
‘I like Germans because they have common sense, they’re rule followers. Attributes I don’t have.’ Cue an entirely believable story about how, aged 22, she lost a shoe on her way to her first day in a new job.
From there the angst (a German concept since the 8th century) developed apace. Barnes started by describing her experience of ADHD and moved on swiftly to her synaesthesia and the rare condition ‘topofantasia’ which she claimed with some justification should be called ‘Barnes Syndrome’. She apologised if this part of her show sounded a bit like a Ted Talk.
It sort of did. But it was a Ted Talk on steroids, delivered at a frantic high speed, high pitch, and high intensity. It was remarkably like the constant rush of unregulated thoughts which she was trying to describe. Except of course it was cleverly structured, not only to explain and seek understanding, but also to entertain. It was packed with jokes.
‘I’m quite an anxious person… I don’t know if you’re picking up on that energy,’ she grinned as she pulled away from deep angst with an account of her experience in an episode of the TV show ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Roads.’ Behind the wheel of a 4X4 on unpaved tracks heading over the Italian Alps, with fellow comic Rhod Gilbert in the passenger seat and a sexist ‘expert local driver’ behind her, Barnes’ set soft landed with a bit of good old-fashioned pure feminist rage.
John Hargreaves
