Original Review:

Show Rating:

And quite eventful it’s been, too. He was, briefly, a professional golfer before landing a job serving the great and the famous in celebrity hangout Langhan’s. Most significantly, he developed a gambling problem and wound up in jail after stealing £7,500 from one of his employers to sustain his habit. And he’s made some similarly catastrophic decisions in his love life too.

There’s quite a lot to get through, which lends a necessary pace to his show, partway between stand-up and dramatic monologue. As he briefly summarises each disastrous episode, he tags a gag that can’t help but seem slightly contrived, even if honest, on to the end of almost every paragraph. It weakens the truth to be making light of it, and weakens the jokes because the audience is still interested in the unfolding story.

As if realising this, once Ward reaches the point where he’s sent down for theft, the emphasis shifts. The general stage lighting switches abruptly to hard spotlight. He sits on a low stool and remains silent for a second. It’s the universal signal that this is the serious acting bit. It’s drama, dahling.

This is the core of the story, when he tells of his time at Her Majesty’s pleasure. The throttle comes off the jokes, but the laughs that do come are more heartfelt, as they sit more comfortably with what’s being said, emerging naturally from his observan, engrossing descriptions of life behind bars.

Ward’s clearly not a toughened criminal so it’s easy to relate to his experiences and his reactions to the people he encountered. In fact, the strength of his tale is that he’s essentially an Everyman, and that the fate that befell him could equally happen to any one of us.

This essential section is a skilful bit of storytelling, compared to the rest of the show that often seems like some facts and some jokes thrown together in the hope it will work. It does to an extent, but never quite seems like a natural union. The ending, in which he ties his formative experiences to the stand-up career he now has, jars a bit, too.

But whatever the pros and cons of the comedy; the key is that Ward has an interesting tale to share, and the audience remains engaged because they want to hear it. In the telling, he proves himself very good company.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett