Teddy Bares
This show takes place in the basement of the new Stand venue at the police band social club. The room is small and the surroundings sparse. The comedian, Teddy (aka Ross Craig), is performing his first solo stand-up show after ten years in the business and so was a bit nervous at the start of this preview show. The show has a lot of strong language and an extended descriptive sex-scene, so it’s not one for the more sensitive types. Teddy is a local comedian and starts by checking if there are any non-scots in the audience, so he can give a few crib-notes about local terms he’ll be using during the show. He is a softly spoken performer and uses no props or other supports.
The show itself is a journey through the comedic career and romantic history of Teddy’s life to see how the mistakes he made have got him from the small town of Dunfermline to the heady heights of Glasgow over the last decade. We hear stories of his encounters with aggressive audience members, demented PR people and a friend who he loves just that bit too much. Many of the stories told are emotionally fraught and you can see how Teddy is reliving some of them as he tells them, and these parts of the show connected well with the audience. There were parts of his routine, though, where he went off on a tangent to deliberately set up tales which were extremely sexist and these, I felt, were very jarring notes in the routine. They didn’t carry the narrative of his tale and appeared to have been introduced to either break the audience’s concentration or to allow Teddy to keep from crying on stage. The centrepiece of his show was the tale of his (un)requited love for an old friend over the last decade and how she really fried his heart over an extended period of time. It’s a deeply painful story of love lust and heartbreak woven through the thread of experiences on the comedy stage.
So the show as a whole was a good start as a solo piece and, once his nerves subside and he tones down the really offensive (and not very funny) asides, this will be one to see if you’re into tales of heartbreak and despair.
Visit the Fringe Website for booking details.