Boisterous charisma steers this ship of fools
The Adam Riches Experience
‘There are no safe seats,” bellows the character comic Adam Riches, introducing two hours of bonkers audience participation. “It’ll happen to you, whether you like it and not.”
It’s no idle threat. On this tour’s opening night, I had to duck to avoid being conked on the head in a game of “extreme swingball”. This winningly stupid sketch show involves the kind of full-bore interaction that (for the mild-mannered) is best faced after a couple of stiff drinks.
What makes it (mostly) work is Riches’s boisterous charisma. Resistance is futile: within seconds of bounding on stage as a gum-chewing sports guru, he has the crowd yelling, “Yes, coach!” like a well-drilled American football squad.
We meet a Baconian triptych of Hollywood himbos: loud and violent Sean Bean, loud and violent Gerard Butler, meek Ryan Gosling. These surreal, overblown impressions are
somehow spot on: yes, Butler is exactly the kind of person who would shave his nose-hair mid-conversation.
Riches, 46, is a familiar face at the Edinburgh Fringe, and won its top award in 2011, but is only now embarking on his first UK tour. It’s a kind of career retrospective, revisiting characters he has created in previous years – most of them macho idiots. One of his shows was called Alpha Males, which neatly sums up the various buffoons he plays here.
One “volunteer” plays a game of hide-and-seek with Yakult-guzzling DVD piracy expert Victor Legit (antihero of Riches’s 2007 outing); another fends off the advances of a faux-woke pickup artist known only as The Guy Who You Meet After Coming Out of a Long-term Relationship (who had an acclaimed Fringe hour to himself last year).
It’s this creation who gets the best gags. Here he is trying to sound deep and soulful: “I love children, the sea, and children of the sea – whelks.”
Riches can craft a sublime oneliner when he wants to, but several of these sketches get by without any, instead taking a shortcut to the easiest laugh (asking one audience member to make sex noises; blowing raspberries on another’s belly). The Adam Riches Experience reaches for low-hanging comic fruit, squashes it, and invites you to smear the juice across his torso.
It’s a loose, messy show, and Riches sometimes struggles to find a pay-off for his sketches. I suspect the reason so many skits end with a parlour-game is that it releases Riches from the burden of having to deliver a punchline. But climb aboard this wobbly ship of fools, and it will take you to strange and wonderful places.