We’ve seen shows about trauma, depression and anxiety. What about a show exploring their blissful absolution? If that sounds like Paul Foot swimming against the comedy tide – well, it wouldn’t be a first. This determinedly whimsical figure has ploughed a far-from-the-mainstream furrow for years. But Dissolve is something different: it departs from whimsy, to address Foot’s own often painful experience of life, then a moment that (he claims) transformed that experience forever. “I’m aware it sounds kind of unbelievable,” says Foot – which, among its other qualities, is what makes this show remarkable: a standup set that leads us into the ineffable, and dares to leave us there.
What actually happened to the 49-year-old? He drip-feeds that information into this cannily constructed set, which begins with a disorientating fairytale on his mother’s knee, and proceeds via amusing if familiar material on the middle-aged and their resistance to change. Then the show throws itself into its first handbrake turn, as Foot ’fesses up to a lifetime of suffocating sadness. Living in “a volatile and erratic state for three decades” was good for his comedy, he reports, but gruelling for his life. In another artful switchback, right in the middle of an erotic fantasy about former shadow cabinet member Chuka Umunna, he then reveals its cause.
But what if that cause, and the burden Foot has carried, could be suddenly, inexplicably absolved? What if the ego could be surpassed? That’s the perspective Foot brings to his material here, as he imagines a revolution to rebuild society from scratch (“we’d keep the House of Lords, of course!”) and wonders what Christianity would look like had Jesus been executed in a less picturesque manner. In his high-pitched Carry On voice and excitable (evangelical, you might say) manner, Foot makes all this bizarrely compelling, and often funny, whether that’s itemising the travails of teen king Tutankhamun or sending up his own frantic-fretful psyche. But more than funny, he makes it mysterious, too, suspending us in belief. You await the final punchline that might make a joke of Foot’s outlandish claims. But for once, quite wonderfully, there isn’t one.
