Crowd work at the start of a standup set is meant to warm up the audience, not be the highlight of the show. Maisie Adam’s night at Leicester Square theatre opens with 20 minutes of back and forth with the crowd prior to the interval, and it’s a hoot. Is it that Adam is lucky, in alighting on several loveably eccentric members of her public, with jobs and life stories that lend themselves to badinage? Or is it her skill in drawing out the eccentricities and playful backchat from her crowd? A bit of both, of course – but the 30-year-old certainly fashions this into a big-hitting overture to her touring show.
But it sets a bar too high for the rest of Adam’s set to vault. The show is called Appraisal: ostensibly, it conducts a performance review of the Yorkshirewoman’s personal and professional life so far. If that implies an hour that lifts the bonnet and roots around in where Adam is at, think again. Appraisal skips lightly across the surface of life as a recently married, satisfyingly successful standup. It addresses, without offering great insights into, the external pressure on Adam to have children; there’s a choice gag about the convention of announcing the weight of a new baby. She marvels that the wayward friends of her youth now have grownup jobs. How did that happen? She mines her appearances on The Chase and Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel for self-deprecating laughs.
A more endearing host, it would be hard to imagine. But none of this cuts deep. Likable though her stories are of mistaking a stripper for a policeman at her hen do, or of the euphemisms she uses to avoid identifying as a comedian, cumulatively it feels insubstantial, its tone of cheery self-mockery a bit unvarying. I missed the specificity of her opening 20 minutes, the “you couldn’t make it up” particularities of her audience members’ lives and personalities – all skilfully exploited by Adam for laughs. Next to all that idiosyncrasy, Adam’s account of herself on the threshold of middle age feels – well, fun, but a bit generic.
• Maisie Adam: Appraisal is touring until 7 November; then 1 February until 6 March
