Original Review:

Show Rating:

Owen begins with a bit of background on his family and the skeletons in their closets, warning with gravitas that there are plenty of them, leading us to expect heinous misdemeanours on the scale of war crime.

Thankfully they consist of little more than his cousin Julie appearing on a porn website and his inadvertent insulting of Princess Margaret at a farm show. But the giant of a skeleton rattling the coat hangers is definitely the tale of how his father was duped into taking on a bunch of smuggled animals by a dodgy fella by the name of Fitzgibbon.

The story is told with feeling and supplemented by cute/gormless pictures of animals, and is genuinely compelling and, in places, quite moving. In fact, the denouement will probably leave you with a tear in your eye.

Although some of the humour isn’t particularly imaginative - he notes that his name when run through the spellchecker comes out as ‘turd,’ there are too many references to the continuingly shagging monkeys and there’s a running joke of how he was constantly mistaken for a girl when he was a teenager because of his longish hair - Owen is nevertheless amiable company.

There are some nice touches in his storytelling technique, such as his observation that there’s a school photo of him on the piano in the background of his cousin’s home-made porn video and the complains of his treatment by the Press as a 14-year-old.

Altogether, a pleasing little show.

Reviewed by: Marissa Burgess