We had a fun night, says Seann Walsh – “but not as fun as if I hadn’t turned up”. The joke is that Walsh – middle-aged, grumpy, permanently tired – hates obligation (“Having to do anything,” he says, “ruins everything”), and is never more excited than when something gets called off. On balance, I was happy that Walsh had turned up, even if the quality of that routine isn’t sustained in a show that sees the Brightonian return to type as the dust settles on his recent tabloid notoriety.
For better or worse, that episode, which saw him branded a “Strictly love rat” and accused by his ex of coercive control, did lead to the richest and most reflective comedy of Walsh’s career. His new show, Back from the Bed, feels like a backwards step. Yes, there are standout routines and choice coinages, as when the 37-year-old scorns twentysomethings idly wondering what they’re gonna do, what they’re gonna be. “There is no do or be!,” rages our host, surveying the bin-fire of hope they call middle-age.
But there are also flashes of the boorishness I thought Walsh had outgrown, and a lot of time spent in very tried/tired and tested comic territory – where the domestic landscape of maturity is contrasted for laughs with Walsh’s wild youth, and where our host is driven to distraction by uncooperative hoovers and self-service checkouts. Walsh brings those act-outs to lurid life, effing, sweating and hurling himself around as he wrestles with a vacuum cable or undertakes sessions with a personal trainer. But his tirades against modern (mid)life start to blend into one another. He could profitably vary the shouty tone.
He does so latterly, with another fine dumbshow (he’s a mean physical comic) about ordering the bill in a restaurant. If that routine locates itself squarely into the middle of the standup road – well, it’s consistent with a show that shies away from the personal disclosures that lit up Walsh’s 2022 Edinburgh fringe set. It’s more fun than a cancelled show, then – if not by as big a margin as Walsh’s recent work led us to expect.
At Winchester Theatre Royal on Friday, then touring
