Want to be a duck? Want your face lathered in shaving foam, live on stage? Aussie comic Steen Raskopoulos, best newcomer nominee at last year’s Edinburgh fringe, is firmly in the Adam Riches school of comedy: his audience aren’t viewers, they’re co-stars. “I won’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself,” he says – which sounds comforting, until you recall that he’s a professional performer paid to make himself ridiculous for other people’s amusement.
The audience aren’t – and too often tonight, it shows. In successive role plays, Raskopoulos summons punters on stage to spar with him. He gives feed lines, and they must improvise responses. This duly procures nervous laughter at his stooges’ pluck, or discomfort. But what happens when the volunteers are uncooperative or uninspired? Here, one sketch collapses when a punter fails to deliver the uplifting speech Raskopoulos demands of him. A movie-pitch scene requiring an audience member to supply its punchlines has nowhere to go when those punchlines, not surprisingly, are flat and unamusing.
There are successes. One chap from the front row is led on a fantasy adventure past trolls and through underground seas, which has a childlike charm. Another has to spontaneously translate a mayoral speech into sign language – which is fun enough, but you can gauge its level by the name Raskopoulos gives his mayor: Dick Jizzings.
Elsewhere, as in his previous show, several scenes trade less in comedy than sentimentality, as another of Raskopoulos’s vulnerable losers takes a hit.
No denying these are beautifully performed: Raskopoulos is a sensitive, subtle character comic, with charisma to spare. There’s a great, if brief, scene of a nervous date warming up in the mirror, and a droll sketch about a condemned man devising a devious stay of execution. When Raskopoulos does the work, the show flies; when it’s left to the audience, less so.
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At Soho theatre, London, until 11 July. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
