Carl-Einar Häckner - Live Review

His name might not mean much to you, unless you were a particularly avid follower of the line-ups of cult variety night La Clique, but Swedish oddball Carl-Einar Hacknrr is offering one of the silliest ways to spend an hour in London this December.

He’s a Nordic Tommy Cooper, with a dash of Lee Evans’s slapstick physicality and a seasoning of deranged bleakness that you might expect, coming from the land of Bergman.

The first half of this show is an energetic roustabout of explosively brilliant visual gags, with Hackner trying to hold in his desperation as he tries to play the snazzy entertainer, despite his apparent incompetence. In his dazzling white suit – straight from the ‘after’ shot of a Persil ad – he bleakly tries to maintain his reluctant showmanship as props collapse, tricks are clumsily revealed and painful mishaps befall him.

As BBC and ITV prepare to launch rival primetime magic-show spectaculars, you can be sure Hackner won’t be on the shortlist. Instead, he delivers a sublime piece of physical comedy, sure to delight even those for whom the very words ‘physical comedy’ are anathema.

With a face apparently fashioned by the Jim Henson workshop, his expressions alone are a joy as he tries, unsuccessfully, to project an upbeat front as his attempts at creating magical wonder fall around him like so much cheap Ikea furniture (and yes, he comprehensively covers the Ikea angle, too). He’s so brilliant at failing, it’s almost a disappointment when a trick actually works, a rare occurrence but just enough to prove the klutziness is an act.

As a foreigner, he has a great sense of being an outsider, exaggerated by his wilful mangling of the English tongue which gives him an endearing naivety… not to mention the inspiration for the ‘magic in a foreign language’ sketch in which he brilliantly, and messily, misunderstands a ‘teach yourself’ tape.

The breathlessly manic pace of the slapstick, honed over a career, can’t be sustained for the hour, and in the second half he kicks back, relaxing into an Abba-style spangled catsuit for a more sedate, but none the less deranged, section. Odd love songs, an extended, pointlessly meandering diversion about Bob Dylan (or ‘Barwb Dee-lon’ as he awkwardly pronounces it), and stilted audience banter about he melancholy of loneliness or the psychology of perception. The laughs come slower here, but he remains so intriguing the room are held in his strange power.

It’s still as mad, but les maniacally so; all part of a quirky show that puts funny peculiar alongside funny ha-ha. It’s worth making sure this Swede is on your Christmas menu.

Reggie Watts - Live Review

The first thing you notice is the hair; a huge fuzzy black sphere of a barnet that makes Reggie Watts look like a human microphone, complete with furry wind guard.

It’s an apt analogy, given this quirky Brooklynite’s musical pedigree – although to call him a musical comedian would be to grossly understate the case. He’s more of a sound sculptor, creating complex audio art.

Which brings us on to the second thing you notice: his incredibly mellifluous voice, with its range as wide as the Rockies – from a laconic mumble to a sultry soul king, from a devastatingly accurate colloquial English to Arabic ululating. Looping his lyrics, his beatbox-style backing rhythms and occasionally a keyboard, he layers up the tracks to build landscapes through which he can meander.

The comedy in part, comes through this apparently shambolic, freeform style. How much of the material he performed at this one-off London show was improvised, and how was planned is impossible to gauge, but Watts certainly has the lightness of touch to make it all seem off the cuff. In a similar way to Ross Noble, the mildly weird stream-of-conscious meandering is enjoyable, but it’s the sudden left-turns his blether takes that spark the laughs.

Much of the appeal lies in the fact he’s doing very much what most of us would do if we suddenly had his talent and his technology. Sure, we might hope to create grand opuses, but on day one we’d arse about, making silly noises into the effects boxes and spouting nonsense just to hear the sound of our own voice. At 39, Watts hasn’t grown out of that, making his performance as endearing as a child’s.

But although his combination of ability without discipline is what makes Watts the engaging presence he is, it also means the show is patchy. There are frequent moments when his ramblings are a bit too soporific, or the audience is asked to tolerate a digression too far.

Yet he’ll snap out of it with some sharp vocal characterisations – one minute channelling the Katt Williams style of sassy black comedian, the next a hippy espousing humanity’s unified consciousness. A sort of earnest muso-speak is his favourite trope, and at times the show feels like you’ve fallen asleep to 6 Music, with meaningless snatches of arcane conversation infiltrating your semi-conscious brain – even if here, again, he can get too self-indulgent.

Despite the laid-back vibe, there’s no escaping the fact that the sharper segments tend to be the best. For his encore, he beds downs an irresistible soul groove for a smooth and pacy trot through his vocal talents, which gels perfectly and is constantly witty, underlining just how loose much of the rest of the show is.

An honourable mention too, for Watts’s physicality, which is a huge asset. The way he makes makes his sturdy frame move to the music awkwardly yet strangely elegantly is a neat contradiction and adds to the easy charm.

But this is only an adjunct to the genius – albeit a lazy one – of his musicianship. With his unique creativity, he’s certainly taken the one-man band concept a long way...