Edinburgh Fringe 2025
James Barr: Sorry I Hurt Your Son (Said My Ex to My Mum)
W!zard Live
Genre: Comedy, LGBTQIA+, Queer Comedy, Stand-Up, True-life
Venue: Buttercup at Underbelly, George Square
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A brave and impressive stand-up hour from James Barr about the things his domestic abuser boyfriend did to him.
Review
This is a courageous, original, thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking hour of stand-up comedy. James Barr is an accomplished comedian who is not frightened to tackle difficult subjects and is willing to lay bare the minutiae of his personal life, including those areas that so many people struggle to admit, let alone share with rooms full of strangers, namely, domestic abuse. It is actually not important to the power of the show that this is domestic abuse within a gay male relationship. It deals with the universal human reactions to domestic abuse that so many people have experienced, starting with hardly noticing it, not labelling it correctly, making light of it, imagining it will not happen again, allowing love to cloud your judgement and logic and so on. It also movingly captures the breakthroughs that are possible if you share your domestic reality, and open up when you get the chance, in James’s case, with a stranger. Having these spelled out as steps all victims of domestic abuse go through will help many recognise abusive relationships that they perhaps had not yet labelled as such. This will be a huge contribution and clarification to many in the audience and is one of James Barr’s aims for the show, along with making us laugh, which he does capably and admirably throughout the hour. It is no mean feat to wrap up tales of domestic violence and emotional cruelty in comedy that helps us follow the story of an upward spiral of unacceptable acts and behaviour from your partner, without feeling overloaded or despairing. This is an impressive achievement in comedy writing and stand up performance. There are also some truly hilarious and graphic descriptions of gay escapades in the aftermath of his break up, and their symbolic meanings for the gay community, that I won’t spoil for you here, but that make this an unapologetically, proudly gay show.
But no hour in a theatre or comedy club is perfect. What I missed was any variety in performance. I am sure James Barr is capable of varying his tone, pitch, volume, movements and emotional range, but these stayed constant throughout. The power of the text and Barr’s comic timing overcame the lack of any variety in the staging and performing of the piece and explains the big impact of the show on the audience, but I am bemused why co-directors Madeleine Parry and Chris Gau felt keeping the tone, pace, volume, emotion and movement constant in this way throughout the hour would enhance the excellent script and superb comic abilities of James Barr. I feel they have missed many tricks in directing Barr to bring more authentic emotion to this important subject and brave exploration-through-comedy. As a courageous stand-up, more sophisticated and nuanced direction could have helped him deliver even more punch and allowed us to witness the authentic human emotional realities, in addition to the cleverly crafted comic descriptions, of his traumatic experiences. Nonetheless, a tour de force.
