John Hegley: Hegley’s Hop Scotch The Stand, Glasgow ✪✪✪
Postponed by Covid, shifting from the Tron Theatre to the smaller Stand comedy club has only enhanced the lo-fi intimacy of John Hegley’s latest hour. Screen illustrations have been eschewed for photocopies stuck to an upright ironing board, squintable enhancements of his gently eccentric but wildly varied view of the world.
In asides, the poet-comic speaks warmly of his daughter’s contributions to this show. But it’s the flavour of his French lineage that lingers. The epistolary relationship he had as a young boy with his Gallic grandmother, glamorous in her mythology, the letters lost yet re-conjured in his mind through her thrillingly forceful but blunt advice to him as a lovelorn adolescent.
Then there is his claim to be a descendent of the composer Jean-philippe Rameau, captured through the prism of his amorous intentions, his pretensions about his forebear bested by his belle’s more illustrious female counterpart to his hero.
As ever with Hegley, any hint of the exotic is grounded in the down-to-earth. His brief flirtation with wearing women’s underwear becomes just another element of his support of Luton Town, the discursive flights of his internal fancy mired in the superstition of football fans.
There is a moving meditation on John Keats’ devotion to his younger sister, Hegley’s admiration of the man eclipsing that of him as a great poet. But elsewhere, the Bedfordshire bard revels in the flip and glib, hailing hamsters in hip hop style, rocking out with a feigned, pained intensity on his mandolin.
A hotchpotch, or variation thereof, is an apt title for a show that wanders all over place and time. But Hegley is never less than engaging, his carefully turned wit delightfully conveying the joy, ache and desire of messy, irrepressible emotion.