Ludlow Fringe Festival 2019
Better Man
Daniel Audritt
Genre: Stand-Up
Venue: The Sitting Room at the Blue Boar, Ludlow
Festival: Ludlow Fringe Festival
Low Down
Never easy to bring work in progress to a small venue on a hot evening in summer, but Daniel carried it off with style and panache.
Review
It’s a tough call to present an audience of A Certain Age – that is a lot older than you – a stream of well-crafted gags on the trials and tribulations of new relationships. Especially when for most of your crowd those agonies of break-ups and ecstacties of starting again are well behind them. Still, Daniel brought a flair to his material and as he tested each story out, finding that unexpectedly for him some jokes received bigger laughs than he’d anticipated. A gifted writer, Dan’s nicely composed riffs might work better on paper than when actually delivered as his style is fast paced and perhaps on occasion too fast to allow the material to breathe. A few of the observations may have fared a lot better if they’d been delivered at a much slower pace and with less eager enthusiasm. I could imagine a more laconic style bringing some real belly laughs which a lot of his material deserved.
Particularly sharp were his comments on the oddities of the language we use for love, “Falling” in love seem to bewilder him when falling is always a bad thing deserving sympathy; he suggested “Jumping” in love. Nice idea. He also had a neat turn deconstructing the tag “Man” for everything that is a stage in life to be honoured as an achievement – Family Man, Business Man, Man about Town and so on. Having babies being an achievement though seemed illogical to him, after all “No-one gets drunk and ends up with a PhD.” Good observational stuff which just needed more delivery time.
