There are newcomers on the fringe delivering comedy in hand-me-down voices – and then there’s John Tothill, a rookie with a fully-formed persona that is all, and only, his own. What a treat to encounter it, in this blithely eccentric hour about pleasure, puritanism and England’s religious history.
In his day job, Tothill is a primary school teacher, and there’s something teacherly in the unlike-anyone-else demeanour he brings to the stage. Foppish, erudite, intellectually self-assured and effervescing like a freshly poured champagne, the Essex man launches straight into his thesis, which is that hedonism and transcendence died with the Reformation – but might yet be rediscovered in the nightclubs of Berlin. The problem is, he can’t keep the sermon on track, what with the audience being so gorgeous (“I’m obsessed with you”), his daily life providing such rich tangential material, and so many historical byways (“quickly on this …”) that make themselves impossible not to explore.
Part of the joke is the overreach, as – hauling himself back on point – Tothill guides us from his chapter on 1517 (Martin Luther kickstarts the Reformation) to his chapter on 1534 (Henry VIII severs links with Rome). Another part is the dissonance between his schoolteacher-from-Southend identity and the fey leopard-print libertine before our eyes. Blame a youth spent doing nothing but playing the clarinet, he says. And being reared in a brand of Catholicism he likens to an old Italian strumpet, whose Penitential Act prayer strikes Tothill not as self-abasing but “camp and horny”.
Well, it takes one to know one: Tothill is camper than a boutique yurt here, imagining himself a “morbidly obese medieval boy king”, reaching for the smelling salts at the bilious infant-school term “wet play”. And cracking plenty of tart jokes, too, like the keeper about TV show The Traitors. “Are we cooking with this?,” he’ll ask. “Is it not so nice?” But there’s conviction beneath all his affectation, and this flirty, funny hour is educational and full of ideas, too. Alone, it may not, as Tothill would wish, vanquish the rascal Cromwell’s legacy. But seeing it is undoubtedly a restoration of the spirit.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
