Comic virtuosity perfectly suited to our chaotic times
Bill Bailey: Limboland Vaudeville Theatre
Only a few months ago, Bill Bailey raised a (metaphorical) clenched fist in solidarity with the Corbynistas, and sounded as if he had joined the ranks of the jezwecan-ers. “Right now he’s exactly what people want and need,” he declared of Labour’s new leader.
But alas, poor Jeremy. What’s this sound I hear at the Vaudeville Theatre? Is it that of a free-thinking, household-name comedian – one of the brainiest of his generation – back-paddling towards the safe harbour of non-commitment?
“I’m a long-term Leftie,” Bailey explains early on in his new set. “You’ve just got to go with the flow when your team’s in the doldrums.”
No ringing endorsement there. It’s as if Labour have released an experimental album, he continues – “and you have to buy it on vinyl”.
He likens Corbyn to an “irascible woodwork teacher”. No comedy show this week could be complete, of course, without reference to Donald Trump, the gift to satire that keeps on giving. “He looks like someone tried to teleport a honey badger from one pod to another,” Bailey jests.
There’s a great line at the expense of the Greens, which I won’t ruin by recycling. In surprisingly emphatic conclusion he observes, “We’ve got no leaders, nothing to get behind.”
At a time of chaos embellished with incompetence, his many-splintered approach to entertainment, combining skittish reflections with casual virtuosic musicianship, fits the bill. If there’s a theme it’s that our quest for happiness should start under our noses rather than with grand plans, and he brilliantly unpicks the misery-guts mentality lurking behind the standard British conversational rejoinder: “Not too bad, all things considered”, taking things to a ludicrous cosmic extreme to expose the fraudulence of that world-weary, phlegmatic statement.
This short West End residency is pricey, ticket-wise, but the theatre’s intimacy sits well with the diminutive star’s unforced, tufty-haired eccentricity and kid-in-his-lair geniality.
There are fewer genre-bending musical “mash-ups” than we’re used to (an impromptu Death Metal version of Abba’s Knowing
Me Knowing You was a rare, opening-night highlight). But in recompense, the anecdotes are longer than usual – he winningly relives a calamitous family trip to the Arctic to see the Northern Lights and details, too, every cringe-making moment of a star-struck backstage encounter with Paul McCartney.
At one point, he likens his brain to a tombola – “a heap of random thoughts”. An apt description – but would that we could all have tombola minds as richly stuffed.