Lee Mack: Hit The Road Mack, On tour
Lee Mack’s success shows that even the simplest of ideas can pay off when properly executed. There’s nothing hugely sophisticated about the setup of his BBC1 sitcom Not Going Out, or for that matter Would I Lie To You?, where he serves as a team captain. Yet the former has racked up seven series of consistently entertaining episodes, while the latter is one of the few panel shows that properly qualifies as unmissable. Mack’s everyman charm is crucial to both shows’ appeal, and this quality comes across in his live work, too: he’s a generally optimistic, gets-knocked-down-but-gets-up-again guy. Of course, there are things that irritate him – and this latest show sees him exploring such petty grievances in some style – but you get the sense that nothing cuts him too deeply, and that for Mack the sun will always be shining tomorrow.
Susan Calman: Lady Like, On tour
If Susan Calman hadn’t become a comedian, by now she’d probably be a full-blown establishment figure. Her dad was chief medical officer for Scotland, England and Wales, and Calman herself was a lawyer before taking up the noble art of making people laugh. Given her background (and frequent presence on Radio 4) you’d expect her to err on the side of the cerebral. In fact she has an earthy style, making frequent reference to her unseemly personal habits: one memorable routine covered her penchant for biting her own toenails. The show’s title may seem like a comment on femininity, but in fact it refers to a personal journey, as she explains how she’s been trying to like being Susan Calman a little bit more.
Sam Simmons: Death Of A Sails-Man, London
Words like “whimsical” and “surreal” are often used to describe the output of Australian maverick Sam Simmons. On the face of it, that seems pretty fair: this latest show tells the overtly unhinged story of a muesli salesman who gets swept out to sea during a windsurfing accident and finds his sanity slowly falling apart. But whereas many surrealist comics allow their digressive imaginations to roam free – and run the risk of falling into the trap of self-indulgence – Simmons always anchors his flights of fancy to strong gags and a kind of perverse logic. Unlike a Tony Law or a Noel Fielding, Simmons doesn’t come across as someone revelling in the absurdist world he conjures up. Instead, it seems to piss him off that he’s constantly surrounded by peculiar characters or eccentrically behaving animals, and his resulting grumpiness makes the laughs all the bigger. Boasting a huge array of deliberately slipshod props and overstated special effects, Death Of A Sails-Man is his most ambitious show yet, and a comic experience like nothing else.
Soho Theatre, W1, Sat & Mon to Fri, to 6 Dec
