There are only three types of standup show, jokes Lucy Porter, and one of them addresses midlife crisis. Et voila! – her new set Consequences is structured around a letter Porter was invited to write to her 16-year-old self, which triggers droll thoughts on how life changes when you’re fortysomething, married with kids and living in a Zone 5 suburban idyll. If its defence of mature quietude (“It’s good to become more pragmatic”) doesn’t exactly quicken the heartbeat, this remains an endearing hour, with Porter a more thoughtful tour guide to middle age than many who got there before her.
It takes time to warm up, as Porter acquaints us with her new life: invisible to lecherous van drivers, bearing no resemblance to her children (“I’ve been ethnically cleansed from my own bloodline”), married to an actor who keeps playing wife-killers. It’s diverting enough, even if Porter delivers much of it with her eyes fixed firmly on the middle distance.
But it’s only when challenged to correspond with her teenage self that she digs beneath standard middle-age fare. Young Lucy, she realises, would have no truck with grownup Lucy’s complacency – although the reply she imagines from 1989-era Porter gets too bogged down in cheap ironies about Brexit, Trump et al to effectively make that point. But the show’s later stages are rich with fine routines – the one about the middle-aged suicide bomber; the closer about musical epiphany on a treadmill – and there’s some honest reflection on what one gains and loses as the years stack up.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 18 March. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
