Jody Kamali’s ‘Backpacker’ could not find a better performing space than this hotel room to portray its Guatemalan hostel setting, where Kamali embodies five successive characters: Abraham the Israeli, Roddy the American, Matt the Bristolian, Toni the recently fired employee, and Ricky the body-obsessed personal trainer.
With its minimalist setting, the show rests on the shoulders of Kamali’s impersonation of his various characters, and this is where it fails. There is no denying the comedian’s talent and his range of accents is brilliant enough to justify the selling out of the show, but the gap-year-like setting offers so many possibilities the comedian never explores. The widely shared experiences of backpacking meetings, foreign hostels, or Lonely Planet guides are all expected by the audience, but remain unused. As a result, the show turns into a succession of rarely funny and often crude sex jokes.
Kamali reveals he is a cometent actor, Roddy being one of the main highlights, but prefers to rely on his characters’ outfits to sustain his show. The few spectators awkwardly giggling at Ricky’s hammock quickly becomes funnier than the characters themselves, whose stories lack too much of cohesion to really entertain the audience. Kamali tries too hard and, while doing so, leaves undeveloped many good aspects. Ricky unexpectedly mentioning his ex-girlfriend and the final hint that the characters are inspired by real backpackers bring a surprisingly deep emotional ending, but leaves the audience unsatisfied by a show that has a lot of potential, but promises more than what it does.
3/5
Adeline Amar
