If there is one thing you are certain once Deborah Frances-White’s show is over, is that the girl is talented. She knows how to handle an audience, ask them for their participation and calming them when is getting out of hand. She is also quite good with improvising, either by prolonging a running joke that the audience have liked, or by having fast and quirky answers and solutions to an unexpected situation that has arisen at some point.
But, even though Frances-White is charming and witty, the show feels sometimes more of a college classroom, than a stand-up spectacle. By trying to inform the audience about all the data she has collected surrounding the world of the mobile phones (apparently we check our mobiles 6 to 10 times more often than we think we do, in vain search of a friend’s text message, or a missed call), she sometimes forgets to be funny, and becomes preaching.
Deborah Frances-White needs to let herself go, forget show structures, bend her own rules, and become more relaxed. She is good at the stand-up improvisation part, so maybe she shouldn’t be afraid to see where the audience takes her. Even more, if she related the subject matter to her own experience, made it more subjective than objective, she would gain from the trust of an audience that doesn’t see her as a threat, someone here to analyse them, but someone who shares exactly the same problems as any of them.
One thing is for certain though. Remember her name, as in years to come you will see it amongst the big ones.
3/5
Adrian G. Velazquez
