Review by Brian Donaldson

As part of his comedy apprenticeship, rising Scottish stand-up Davey Connor has been the support act for Jenny Éclair and Russell Kane’s Glasgow Comedy Festival gigs. Now that he has been given his own hour-slot after such exposure, it’s little surprise that he has an assured, calm and personable stage presence.

This solo debut, Pieces Of What?, is an amiable but slightly underpowered hour of musings about his upbringing, relationships, superstition, buying lingerie and death, though his only real brush with the doings of the Grim Reaper was the carnage wrought upon some tadpoles he owned as a boy.

As a care worker, Connor (aka the stand-up artist formerly known as Davey See) freely admits that his day job is not exactly ‘sexy’, but stand-up has provided him with an escape. But not even he could have imagined that he would one day ‘be’ James Bond as part of a Marie Curie promotional campaign.

This scenario acts as the core of the show, to which he returns on a few occasions, showing us the enlarged photos of himself, tuxed-up, alongside his ‘Bond Girl’, former Miss Scotland Nieve Jennings insisting that they didn’t quite have the chemistry that the organiser might have wanted: ‘It was more like a WAG with her butler’. The day ended rather oddly, with Connor being introduced to an elderly blind woman who happened to be an 007 obsessive.

A few throwaway lines about air travel and the French being arrogant should be chucked in the bin and replaced with the kind of routines that made this show work best. He vividly recounted growing up in Saltcoats, dubbing the seaside Ayrshire town as ‘Blackpool with leprosy’. There was also a lovely line about how to discover whether someone is a ‘cat person’ and pleasing material about his relationship with his young son.

While the Edinburgh Fringe gets plenty of justifiable criticism over cramming crowds into tiny sweatboxes or venues with cold leaky drips, Brel, had its own problems: to audience’s left was a boisterous beer garden whose revellers occasionally tried to gatecrash the venue on their way back to the toilet or bar.

Connor ploughed on regardless though he did seem temporarily distracted by events outside where a heated exchange thankfully turned out to be a harmless spot of Glasgow banter rather than a brewing of trouble.

Ultimately. though, Connor was outshone by his own support act, Matthew Winning. With some actual jokes and delicious bits about his painfully unfunny parents who can’t see the dividing line between their son’s comedy and his real life, there was an edge and drive to Winning’s brief but inventive set that Connor could do with injecting into his own material.

Review date: 26 Mar 2012
Reviewed by: Brian Donaldson
Reviewed at: Glasgow Bar Brel