Plymouth, Dubai, Oslo – the locations of three consecutive gigs on his last tour, Dara Ó Briain tells us. So how do you write a comedy show that appeals to all those audiences and retains its currency across two years of gigging? Such are the standup’s dilemmas in this industrial era of comedy. But the Irishman makes light of them with Voice of Reason, another globetrotting set that may stint on topicality and local specificity but not on meticulously well worked laughs about the unglamorous middle age of a husband, dad and celeb.
So are the demands of world touring depriving us of a harder-edged Ó Briain? Probably not. Even when he had the opportunity, the Mock the Week man was never one to cut deep with his comedy. But it can be fun splashing in the shallows, seldom more so than this evening, as Ó Briain mines his public status, midlife hypochondria and the march of technology for big-hitting entertainment.
He starts as he means to go on, with gentle self-mockery of his role as Brian Cox’s wingman on Stargazing Live. It’s not the last example offered of the indignities of life in the public eye. One story tells how he fluffed the climactic punchline on the last gig of his last tour. Later, he has great fun with a news story that pronounced him dead in a ravine-based car crash in central Dublin. On stage, Ó Briain has the aristocratic bearing of someone esteemed in almost every household in the land. But – like David Baddiel before him – he seems to relish the incongruities of fame at least as much as the elevated status.
By the time of his fake news routine, midway through act two, the show’s impressive structural intricacy is revealing itself. There are no grinding gears as Ó Briain cruises from one subject to the next. The callbacks aren’t just cheap tricks; they thread the show together. He talks about hosting Robot Wars, and it becomes easy to see this show as an exercise in mechanical engineering. The springs and cogs are expertly wound; everything detonates precisely when it’s supposed to.
Only now and then does the blueprint feel conspicuous. His crowd work is highly effective, but the principles by which it operates aren’t well hidden. He feigns indignation at audience responses he himself has orchestrated. He puts words in the audience’s mouth – then makes them feel funny for thinking of them. He feeds scraps from the front row into stream-of-consciousness ad libbing, which sometimes yields comic gold (there’s a fine off-the-cuff gag about a faulty sign outside the theatre) and sometimes trips over itself (“Dominic – what’s your name?”).
I prefer him on-script: there are several top-notch routines tonight. Like Bill Bailey at the same address a few months back, Ó Briain treads twinkle-toed the tightrope separating Brexit-sceptic material from a (presumably) Brexity audience. Elsewhere, there’s a beautiful line to describe the particular sense of loss when his unused bike gets stolen (“To steal from me the me I could become if I wasn’t the me I am!”), and a show-stopping joke about why VR tech isn’t being used for porn: a simple premise built on, block by block, until something toweringly funny takes shape.
• Touring until December.
