Sitcoms, in the UK at least, are rarely written by renowned standups – Jo Brand is an exception, as are self-penned star vehicles Miranda and Count Arthur Strong. Plays by comedians are thinner still on the ground. But last week I saw both a sitcom pilot by James Acaster (We the Jury) and a play by Liam Williams (Travesty). I was eager to see whether those standups’ unmistakeable voices are as funny, or as striking, in others’ mouths.
We the Jury is derived from Acaster’s 2015 show Represent, which ostensibly recounted his experience of jury service. I say ostensibly because Acaster is a slippery customer. His standup isn’t recognisably autobiographical: his jury service routine felt like a loopy metaphor and was probably fiction. But he clearly felt it had legs, because now we have a TV half-hour on the same subject, starring Ed Easton (of sketch troupe Gein’s Family Giftshop) as dorky cinema worker William, whose dream comes true when he’s summoned to sit on the jury at a croupier’s murder trial. Diane (Philomena Cunk) Morgan and Vivienne Acheampong – seen lately in Rainbow Class on the Edinburgh fringe – co-star as fellow jurors.
If you’re a fan of Acaster’s standup, as I am, you can’t watch We the Jury without playing back at least a few of its lines in his own fastidious Kettering tones. I can easily imagine an Acaster routine about the phrase (which crops up here) “You’re a poet and you don’t know it” – he’d get 10 good minutes out of that. As for the trial of an auctioneer that was open and shut double-quick because the witnesses were all auctioneers, and they speak really fast? Well, that crack bears its maker’s mark very visibly indeed.
The show’s brand of heightened reality, too, is analogous to the not-quite-real world Acaster occupies in his standup. But it’s less successful. Onstage, Acaster is totally in control of his askew reality, and of the vast importance assumed there by trivial things. In his pilot, the tone feels less certain: it’s hard to know if we’re meant to find William this much of a berk, given that everyone else seems pretty juvenile too.
That may come, if We the Jury ever sees the light of a series. No such possibility for Travesty, a self-contained two-hander stage play from Williams, whose 2014 show Capitalism so blazingly and black-comically articulated anti-capitalist impotence and generational despair. Travesty traces a relationship from genesis to death throes and beyond. It’s not a comedy – and yet Williams’ voice is more recognisable here than Acaster’s in We the Jury. The romantic-depressive outlook is recognisably his; so too the existential cri de coeur underpinning a play about a man only briefly rescued by love from life’s meaninglessness.
Unlike in Acaster’s pilot, there’s a character here who feels like a proxy for Williams. OK, so Ben is played by a woman (Lydia Larson; the play is cross-cast, although it’s not clear why). But he speaks like Williams; you’d swear Larson has adopted some of Williams’ diffident mannerisms, and at one point the character even punches a wall, recalling Williams walloping the ceiling until his fist bled in his 2015 show Bonfire Night. There are countless jaundiced-philosophical turns of phrase that sound like the authorial voice (“Love shouldn’t be mediated through consumption”, and so on). The problem is that the second character, Anna, has far less personality. And also that, unlike in Williams’ standup, there’s too little countervailing humour.
What makes Williams exciting as a comedian is the unresolved tensions between depression and still-flickering faith, between finding himself tragic and finding himself ridiculous. In a sense, his standup voice is made up of several competing voices, those waging the arguments in his head. In Travesty, only one of those voices is loudly heard, and for the want of the others, a more conventional bland of bleakness wins out.
Watching the two – the sitcom and the play – reminded me of how difficult and delicate it is to hone a strong comic voice, and how we can’t assume it’s easily transferable. Acaster has spoken about the evolution of his own stage persona; he didn’t emerge fully formed, as those of us who saw his early work can attest. It’s just as difficult to develop the skills required of a playwright or sitcom writer – notwithstanding that Acaster and Williams’ achievements as writer-performers give them a pretty good head-start. At their best, We the Jury and Travesty offer glimpses of two inimitable comic voices. In neither case is it enough to (yet) produce work anywhere near as accomplished as their standup.
Three to see
The Pajama Men
A UK tour kicks off for one of the great double-acts in world comedy: the shape-shifting, darkly comic impro-sketch originals Mark Chavez and Shenoah Allen. This Three Musketeers refit wasn’t their best show when it premiered in Edinburgh last summer, but even short of peak Pajama, the duo’s skills are a wonder to behold.
- At Ashcroft Arts Centre, Fareham, on Wednesday; at Cambridge Junction on Thursday and Friday; then touring.
Tom Ballard
A best newcomer nod, then a nomination for the main Edinburgh Comedy Award: not a bad first two visits to the Fringe for the young, politics-and-pop-culture Aussie comic. Now Tom Ballard brings the 2016 show to Soho: expect jokes about Isis, Hillary Clinton and, er, Justin Bieber.
- At Soho theatre until Saturday.
Shappi Khorsandi
Ten years into her standup career, Shappi Khorsandi hits the road with a love letter to her adopted country, England. Brexit, the refugee crisis and the rise of the far-right are all on the agenda but Edinburgh previews suggest an affectionate, rather than a spikily political, set from the Iranian-born Brit.
- At the Roses, Tewkesbury, on Wednesday; Brook theatre, Chatham, on Saturday; then touring.
