Luke Rollason comes clean

I was once almost killed by an overstuffed bag of props. Trying to pull it on to a train in Leicester, it instead pulled me between the tracks as the doors started to close. This should have been a warning sign.

As I write this, here’s a list of the objects I can see scattered in my immediate vision, on the desk that is supposed to be for focused work.

1 jack in the box.
1 egg-shaped maraca.
2 empty cigarette boxes (I don’t smoke).
1 powerdrill with a toothbrush on the end.
1 leafblower (working)
1 leafblower (broken) (I can never remember which one.)
½ a feather boa.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. (I also have a cardboard iceberg somewhere.)

I have to confess, I have a problem.

Hi, I’m Luke Rollason, and I am a prop comedian.

I am also, it turns out, a hoarder. But it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The opportunity to establish cause-and-effect has long become buried under discarded half-ideas and ‘vital’ show-centric set pieces in desperate need of repair. Good luck telling the difference.

My career has long enabled my absolute worst habit – providing justification for holding onto the strangest objects *just in case* I can one day use them in a show. I have a slice of brown bread encased in resin that has lived with me rent-free, hitching rides from one tiny rented room to the next, for more than half a decade. It doesn’t look good anywhere. It is a slice of brown bread.

It’s a shock to no one that there is a link between our interior lives and our exterior circumstances. And I’m definitely at my least productive when I’m knee-deep in little reminders of projects I’ve never finished. So I try – I really do – to establish some order amongst the chaos. But every time I do my job, I end up turning my entire life upside-down once again just to gather my material together.

My new show, Bowerbird, explores our relationships to the stuff we surround ourselves with and the link between the mess we are and the mess we make. It’s named after nature’s kleptomaniac, a feathered collector-hoarder that attracts a mate with monochromatic bric-a-brac.

Unavoidably, I wrote it in a time period where we all formed pretty unhealthy attachments to whatever we used to fill in for human connection. No matter what the circumstances, creating is how we cope with what life throws us, and there’s plenty of people talking about their life and what it has shrunk to become. I’m the only one who has chosen to literally drag their emotional baggage behind them.

Plenty of comedians use ‘confessional’ stand-up to represent their lives in their work, and lots has been written elsewhere exploring the benefits and the cost of relieving trauma onstage. Shaparak Khorsandi has written beautifully about the regret of turning her divorce into material.

I’m beginning to question what an attachment to physical objects does for our ability to move on from whatever they have supported us through. This stuff doesn’t just take up space in my head – it takes up space everywhere.

The dictionary (that I found on Google just now) defines a prop as ‘a temporary support or to keep something in position.’ Does holding on stop me from letting go?

So: after this year, I’m going to Marie Kondo my whole career. Come watch these objects spark some joy before it all burns to the ground.

• Luke Rollason: Bowerbird is on at Monkey Barrel: Hive 2 at 12.30pm. Tickets.

Published: 7 Aug 2022