The seeds of Sara Pascoe’s Manchester international festival (MIF) show were planted at last year’s Edinburgh fringe. She was performing Sara Pascoe v History, a winningly eclectic anthropology of relationships, of why they fail and how they might succeed – which secured her first (long overdue) Edinburgh comedy award nomination. One night, she looked into the audience and saw someone absorbed in their iPhone. “It kept tinging, he was just scrolling through it,” she says. “I was so furious. I’d usually ignore that, but this time I said, ‘Are you just going to sit there and text?’ And he didn’t even look up at me. I was like, ‘I’m right here, and you won’t even look at me. You won’t even look me in the eye! What you’re doing is so rude!’”
Later, she got an email. “It was this man, explaining that it was his mother’s phone, he was trying to work out how to switch it off. And that he had cerebral palsy, and whenever he spoke up at comedy gigs, people assumed he was drunk. And because I was being horrible to him, he didn’t want to meet my eye.” Pascoe was horrified – and interested. “What I had created in my mind – this stubborn, rude man – was the exact opposite of the truth. It was actually someone who was scared.” An idea for a show was born, “to do with empathy, and how we create narratives about other people’s actions that either excuse or demonise them. So now I’m trying to find funny stories that demonstrate that ...”
She’s not done yet: the MIF performances are previews of a show that – when it’s finished – will feature multiple performers, and higher theatricality than the solo standup that made Pascoe’s name. An autumn residency at Battersea Arts Centre will bring co-stars onboard, she says, whose job is “to say all the stuff I really want to talk about in my standup but I’m too ashamed to”. Pushed for examples, she tells a story of her teenage years, when she went round school sticking pins in pictures of a friend who’d got a better part in the drama club show. “That’s a side of myself that I don’t like,” says Pascoe, “but that hasn’t gone away. There are certain things I’ve done that are just horrible.”
Fans of her standup might find that hard to believe. She’s super-endearing onstage: intelligent, allergic to cliche, delightfully honest about the tangle of principle and prejudice we get into when trying to make ourselves and the world better. Which is what her shows do. They’re not trivial: they’re self-searching, outspoken and feminist. She’s in the vanguard – with Josie Long, Bridget Christie and others – of a generation of women now making the running in UK standup.
But is she in for the long haul? When I last interviewed Pascoe, she was a panel-show refusenik. Now, she’s never off them. She’s not performing on this year’s Edinburgh fringe, for the first time in a decade. Instead, she’s at MIF – highest of high-end arts festivals – and talking of big casts and theatricality. Does all this imply a departure from standup’s more rudimentary charms?
Well, not quite: she’s doing panel shows mainly because “they’re just so great at getting people to come to your gigs”. Her new show will unmistakably be a comedy, she promises. “I try so hard to be serious, but it feels like I can’t be. Things I think are going to be sad, everyone laughs at. So I see it as a theatrical comedy show.” And the suggestion that MIF is a cultural notch above, say, the same city’s Frog & Bucket comedy club leaves her nonplussed. “Is MIF high-end? What does that mean? Sometimes all it means is that the audience sit there with their arms folded and judge you, doesn’t it?”
Her absence from Edinburgh causes Pascoe more anxiety, but it’s easily explained. She’s writing a book for Faber: a “funny, feminist exploration of the female body”, due for submission at the end of August. It’s her current priority, and writing it is “really great – for half of the time. The other half I miss having an audience to try stuff out on. I’m so used to an audience, whether I disagree with them or not, shaping what my work is.” Take the public out of the equation and, says Pascoe, “the heckling in your own head is awful”.
So next month, she’ll be chained to her desk, not to the wheel of the biggest event in world comedy. “It’ll feel weird once it’s happening,” she says. “But I have to tell myself, I can’t lose at Edinburgh this year, because I’m not going.”
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Sara Pascoe: The Museum of Robot Pussycats is at MIF on Friday.
