‘Who is the real Richard Gadd?” That’s the phrase - culled from one of his old reviews – that reverberates through Monkey See Monkey Do, a new multimedia solo show by the Fife comic, the follow-up to 2015’s late-night stunt-comedy hit Waiting for Gaddot.
In his earliest shows, full of sex, violence and debasement, there was a sense that a less cartoonish Gadd might be evading detection beneath the surface schlock. Well, now he makes his appearance – but only after spending his whole show on a treadmill, fleeing his demons and the horror of intimate self-exposure on stage at the Edinburgh fringe.
The backbone here is Gadd’s crazed inner monologue while out running – a strategy he’s adopted (perhaps inspired by Katie Hopkins’s withering tweet about depression) to keep anxiety at bay. As he pounds away on the treadmill, we hear about the “Man’s Man final in Mansfield, hosted by Jason Manford”, which he’s contesting to prove his unimpeachable masculinity. What was it lurking in his imagination that cost him last year’s title? And who’s this gorilla bearing down every time Gadd throws a backward glance? The style will be familiar to Gadd regulars. Video, audio, images and onstage action are spliced at a bewildering pace.
It’s ruthlessly explicit: almost the first thing we see is footage of Gadd vomiting at the camera. But here, the grindhouse stylings tend towards something emotionally significant, edging ever closer as Gadd plays soundclips from sessions with his analyst – lip-synched on screen by two upside-down chins.
There’s no denying it’s less purely entertaining than last year’s triumph. There are fewer big laughs: “My third mistake,” Gadd explains in an epilogue, “was putting this show in the comedy section [of the fringe brochure].” It’s not as anarchic, nor is it – as Waiting for Gaddot was – a really good prank. The central device – onstage performer in dialogue with inner demons – is a familiar one, albeit that Gadd takes it in extreme directions. Even the treadmill motif brings to mind the live artist-cum-comedian Kim Noble, who also performed a depressive show on a treadmill, and by comparison with whom Gadd’s work has suffered in the past.
But it’s undeniably compelling, as our stricken host tries to reason his anxieties to the ground – only to see his rational brain down tools, board the first flight to Switzerland, and check in at Dignitas. A chance encounter with an ex-girlfriend reveals a man unable to conduct the most basic small talk, so consumed is he by self-consciousness and shame. When the reason for that emerges, Gadd downs his comedic tools too, speaking to us in the raw of his difficulties, over six years, rallying the strength to speak up. Not for the first time at this year’s fringe, this is a show that by the end offers open-vein emotional engagement over laughs, as we bear witness to Gadd’s healing. It’s strong stuff, and courageous: a lurid, unsparing portrait of a consciousness in meltdown, as the clock ticks on the most tightly held secret of his life.
At Banshee Labyrinth, Edinburgh, until 28 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
