Injury time is mushrooming in football in response to the realisation that, in any 90-minute match, the ball may be in play for only half of that. That thought sprang to mind as I watched TikTok star Adrian Bliss’s fringe show. It lasts an hour, but Bliss can’t be on stage for more than 30 minutes. The rest is scene changes in blackout, while a voiceover and pulsing red light bridge the gaps. There is lots to recommend Inside Everyone, but as a stab at translating Bliss’s online sketches into the live medium, it must be chalked up as a somewhat qualified success.
The red light represents an atom, whose journey from the outer cosmos to the Earth, then throughout human history, forms the show’s spine. In practice, that means a succession of historical sketches, featuring Bliss as a dinosaur posing for its fossil, as Boudicca scorning Roman wine, and as Van Gogh’s severed ear. There’s a lovely offhandedness and naivety to Bliss’s performance – a naivety that arguably extends to the whole, as Inside Everyone climaxes in hippy-ish wonderment at the interconnectedness of everything. “Do you see,” our host rhapsodies at the soaring finale, “the magnificent unity of it all?”
It’s a matter of taste whether you commend the lack of cynicism or regret the overearnestness. Either way, you’ll find something to enjoy in the 29-year-old’s lucky dip of sketches, most involving dialogue with invisible off-stage interlocutors. Some scenes (the one about Julius Caesar’s lunch, say) feel throwaway, particularly given the laborious changeovers. A skit about Shakespeare’s outsized ruff is fun, even while feeling like a clown routine in search of a more adept clown. His Pandora’s box sketch, with Bliss equally desperate to open the forbidden chest and to preserve his plausible deniability (coyly, to the audience: “I couldn’t ask you a favour, could I?”), is a standout.
His gazillion fans should be satisfied by a show with higher production standards than most fringe comedy – and with a few of his TikTok characters included. As for the rest of us – well, I’d pick Bliss for the next match, but he gets a yellow card for time-wasting.
At Soho theatre, London, 18-30 September.
