Seymour Mace In Hanging Out With Seymour Mace
Live Review

Not long after Friday Night Live had kicked off my interest in comedy I studied Trevor Griffiths's prescient play Comedians which cemented my fascination with stand-up and the changes it was going through in the early Eighties. A lot of people my age will have followed a similar timeline and identified some of the characters in Comedians with actual comics, but few would ever be able to place the anti-comedy miscreant Gethin Price.

Currently there are quite a few pretenders to this 'throne' but Seymour Mace is one of the most likely. The Manchester-based Geordie is not afraid of the sound of tumbleweed, and his previous shows have been so low on energy that this sound has threatened to be the abiding memory from them. Not so this year as Mace kicks things up a notch, so much so that his finale sees him in a ruffled shirt miming the role of backing singer on Gladys Knight and the Pips’ Midnight Train to Georgia.

It's not all-singing, all-dancing of course. The trademark meanderings are still there, literally epitomised in a routine that finds Mace wandering out of his house, not sure where he is headed, only to realise that he was meant to be headed into his kitchen to turn an appliance off and not outside after all.

Ever downbeat, Mace isn't quite so despondent this year, claiming he is making an effort after criticisms that his work to date has revealed nothing about his personality. He quickly concludes that he is simply a lazy stoner. This would explain the duologue that explores the lure of Button Moon and why the characters would want to go there so much. Here, as elsewhere, he feels his way around to a decent payoff, but you have to be prepared to indulge him the journey.

As if to make sure that the jokes-per-minute rate averages out better, Mace uses the familiar ruse of reading a brief salvo of one-liners from a book, a self-conscious back-to-basics approach. Some of the lines are corny but many upstage what's on offer elsewhere.

Before I first saw Mace he was being sold to me as a genius, a term one woman utters tonight in response to some opening banter. Mace immediately gives the correct health warning to her – that genius is a much abused word. Is he consciously acknowledging the expectations that have heaped upon him?

I don't know. However, I do know that, like Gethin Price, even if you can't always go with him you have to afford him some respect, something that is much easier to do after seeing this show.