Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Having scored an artistic success with his last outing Chronic Boom, a story about his battles with chronic illness, the soulful Liam Withnail further develops the emotionality of his storytelling with a new show that focuses on how he ran away from home as a teenage alcoholic, escaping Dagenham with a wad of stolen cash to look for a new life in Edinburgh.

This is all foregrounded by some strong material about addiction, and how it still manifests in his life after ten years off the booze and drugs. Dealing with his feelings through eating as a substitute, he’s targeted online by a personal trainer who dogs his every waking moment with muscle emojis and commands to push through the pain.

But as a chronic illness sufferer and recovering alcoholic, you necessarily have to develop a more complex relationship with pain, and Withnail’s process involves finding the uplift in challenging times, which is exactly what his life in Dagenham was. A BNP stronghold and second most unhappy place to live in the UK, in the early 2000s it was a place where being into the Pigeon Detectives and wearing skinny jeans was enough to make you a pariah.

It sounds like he had a sweet relationship with his mother and father, illustrated through some very funny childhood anecdotes, but early attempts to escape (getting an audition for Harry Potter) were foiled by small town small-mindedness (his Mum thought the official Harry Potter website was probably run by paedophiles). 

In the end it was getting dumped by an indie sleaze princess that provided the catalyst for a descent into alcoholism that was already well under way, after he was entranced by his first sip of Guinness at age seven.

Withnail has always been a fantastic storyteller, and that’s the secret sauce to this show. Deceptively sensitive given the geezerish hangover of his Dagenham upbringing, you should expect things to get a little dusty in the room near the end of this one.

 Whether the lovely little box he paints around this chapter in his life is quite representative of the truth, well that’s a matter for interpretation. Like Chronic Boom, this show ends on a major uplift, but you might notice in the telling that it was several more years before he managed to kick the booze. Something to really crack out the tissues for on the next show, I suppose.

Review date: 15 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club