Jake Yapp's Free At Four - Fringe 2009
Live Review

Like some aspects of the Free Fringe itself, Jake Yapp’s show is a ramshackle affair. When the bar venue turns off its music it’s showtime, and Yapp immediately fills the silence with more music; his signature tune: The House of Pain’s Jump Around as played on a ukulele. That he doesn’t bother singing the next verse is symbolic of his patchy 45 minute set.

Clearly a wit but equally apparent he’s no stand-up, Yapp’s subsequent elongated tale of his hygienically-challenged cat meanders rather than purrs and does little to gain the confidence of his audience. However, the aforementioned wit does start to seep out here and there, principally in asides and later in some banter with one rather ‘merry’ lady in the audience.

Polite and erudite – except when bootlegging the explicit RnB tune My Neck, My Back –  and almost reminiscent of the Hugh Grant Englishness he speaks about in one of his yarns, Yapp uses the fall-back of reading out a portion of a novel he has supposedly tried but failed to publish. While this is an easy filler, the content of it reinforces the feeling that behind this eclectic mess of a show lies a comic mind.

As his closing remarks attest, Free At Four is really a taster for his evening show at The Caves. Remarkably he has done enough to make some of us curious about the ‘real’ show. It’s doubtful that the Free Fringe wishes to be known as a try-before-you buy festival but in this particular case that’s exactly what has happened.