We have Covid to thank for So Where Were We? being a more intimate show than we expect from Dara O Briain. Nothing happened for two years, says the man himself – so he was forced to look inward for material. Intimacy is relative, of course: the Mock the Week man is not an #oversharer, and even the most confessional tale tonight, of hunting down his birth parents, keeps much of its emotional significance to O Briain under wraps. But that’s scarcely to the detriment of a lovely, funny story, in a show that’s got funny stories to spare.
O Briain establishes his capable raconteurship right out of the traps, with the tale of his frantic, and not very dignified, return to the UK when lockdown was declared. His dignity is important to O Briain, he tells us – but only to ratchet up the comedy of all these stories in which it’s repeatedly undermined. There’s the misunderstanding that finds the 50-year-old trying to blag a free novelty toilet, or the time he mobility-scooted his way around Alton Towers after a knee operation.
O Briain is the butt of most of these jokes, although his mum and dad get a look-in too, as a handful of childhood stories lay the groundwork for what’s to come in Act Two. And it’s not all about our host’s self-abasement. There’s fine crowd-work, as always from this source, and some choice joke-writing – notably the one, of which the Wicklow man is rightly proud, about the downside of having only one testicle.
But the standout routine concerns the adopted O Briain’s efforts to trace his birth certificate (a right then denied him by Irish law) and his birth parents. It’s a set-piece you might classify as comedy-Kafkaesque, given the obstacles Irish bureaucracy puts in O Briain’s way. But the story gains impact, too, from being set in the context of his home country’s shameful history of babies removed, abandoned and sold. If O Briain reserves the privacy of his feelings as answers are finally unearthed, this remains a gripping tale, in a show that proves introspection perfectly compatible with O Briain’s standup.
Saturday, Villa Marina, Douglas, Isle of Man; then touring
