John Hegley’s latest show is well-observed, beautifully crafted performance poetry at its best. Hegley himself is entirely comfortable on stage, pointing out the ridiculous in the ordinary with a charming, self-effacing style. His performance is truly interactive, as the audience vote on everything from the accent he reads the poems in to the hat his puppet dog wears. On entry, everyone is given a programme and a piece of charcoal and encouraged to get creative, and all are expected to participate in a song about a squeaky wheel and a beetroot.
The poems range from odes to his beloved Luton football club to a song about his dead grandfather’s glasses. Oddly, there is rather a lot of glasses based humour, culminating in a slightly surreal audience competition. The winners of this competition then perform in the grand finale – which involves two men wearing masks and flinging a spring onion into a hat with the aid of a small face cloth. Yet again Hegley proves himself a master of bathos. His beautifully mundane description delighted the sell out audience.
Get a ticket if you still can; it is fascinating, entertaining and entirely unmissable.
5/5
Jade Wright
