Jordan Brookes: The Part of You That’s Always Screaming review – former fringe champ’s chewy croissant tale
This is a spiky, interrogative and surprisingly conventional set from an act who usually pushes standup to its limits
You can fall victim to your own high standards – and few comics have set higher standards than Jordan Brookes. A new show from the 2019 comedy award champ is an event, at which half the fun is seeing how he’s monstered the form into some unforeseen new shape. If this year’s offering, The Part of You That’s Always Screaming, were delivered by any other comic, I’d be hailing it as one of the twistiest and deepest-thinking hours on the fringe. But it lacks Brookes’ usual ambition: its delivery is fairly conventional; things aren’t pushed as far as we expect.
It’s all relative, mind you: this is still a set in which, at one unexpected moment, our comedian turns down the lights, turns up some disturbing industrial soundscape, and jerks threateningly across the stage. But then we act differently when we’re being watched – which is Brookes’ point here, in a show that worries intensely at the relationship between selfhood and being seen. It’s structured, deliciously, around an innocuous experience on a train, when Brookes snacking on a croissant becomes a performative act, awkwardly positioned as he is between the window and a window-gazing fellow passenger.
How are we affected by another’s gaze – or our own? Do you ever get tired of your own POV? What’s the worst thing cyber-hackers might see through your webcam? It’s always entertaining to trace the knotted thread of Brookes’ thinking, even as it spools away from the main subject, towards amusing standalone riffs on pickup artistry and (very droll, this) the idea of the super-strong mother who can lift a car to save her child.
Really, I should be satisfied with the high quality of the comedy alone. But with Brookes, we’ve been trained to expect more, and I kept wondering when the opening routine, about the early film Train Pulling Into a Station, was going to get its stunt payoff, or what dramatic ending was in store for the croissant tale. These expectations were thwarted – but dial your expectations down merely to spiky and interrogative comedy, and they will be amply rewarded.
At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 30 August