With her mile-a-minute delivery and inability to stop moving, it is actually physically exhausting to watch Natalie Haynes perform. Her style and demeanour can be a little hard to adapt to but, thankfully, her exploration of ideas isn’t so flighty, so there is at least one aspect of the show that you can settle into. Unfortunately, Haynes’ style doesn’t suit everyone and a large number of the audience just don’t warm to her, leaving her intelligent, and sometimes convoluted, gags high and dry.
While Haynes displays an obviously sharp intellect, she doesn’t seem to have thought the structure of this year’s show through properly and doesn’t make the most of her central theme – turning 30 and trying to decide whether to ‘run or die’. This seems to be a bit of a shame, as the material related to this is undeniably funny but it is largely lost in the confusion of reclaiming ‘cunt’ as an acceptable everyday word and her fascination with parrots.
With a little tweaking Run Or Die could be a fantastically well observed show, especially to an audience who would warm to her slightly geeky persona, but at the moment it is a little hair-brained and scatty. She makes some good points along the way but the overall thread is a bit confused and not as entertaining as it really should be.
3/5
Richard Biggs
