Professional curmudgeon is a familiar standup persona, and Seann Walsh wears it well – which is handy, given that he’s casting around for a new role. In his early shows – The Lie-In King was Edinburgh comedy award-nominated – Walsh played the roistering lager lout. Aged 31, and reluctantly grown-up (“I can now see crumbs!”), that’s hard to sustain. Instead, in One for the Road, he plays the appalled refugee from youth into maturity, aghast at the ways the sober British adult is nowadays expected to spend his time.
It’s a well-worn shtick, which Walsh makes sing. A sizeable section addresses “clean eating”, and clean living generally, as gluten-free, vapes, “courgetti” and “cucumber in the water!” get it sharply in the neck. Sometimes he overdoes it: jokes about herbal tea and sparkling water might have worked 20 years ago, but now sound fuddy-duddy. More often, Walsh’s ear is acute for the cant attendant on food fads and health binges, as with his droll routine about loving soup, or the sketch depicting bread as tomorrow’s illicit narcotic fix.
The second half is weaker: a riff on the anthropology of restaurant dining has its moments, but strains for relatability. His Tinder jokes feel dutiful, even if elsewhere he’s on the nose about our slavishness to smartphones. (“Thinking: remember that?”) But the gig stays lively, thanks to a pair of restive audience members whose eccentricities Walsh embroils skilfully in the comedy. No night on the tiles, this – but it’s an enjoyable middle-aged alternative.
• At Tivoli theatre, Wimborne Minster, 28 February. Box office: 01202 885566; Stables, Milton Keynes (01908 280800), 1 March. Then touring.
