Sarah Kendall: A Day In October

Brighton Dome Studio Theatre, New Road, Sunday, October 18

*The Guide has just heard today (Fri 16) that Sarah Kendall has had to cancel her appearance at Brighton Comedy Festival due to ill health.

BACK in 2004 Sarah Kendall became the first woman to be nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award since Jenny Eclair won it nine years earlier.

This August, 11 years on, Kendall found herself on the shortlist for the now-Fosters Edinburgh Comedy Award once more.

But A Day In October is very different from the stand-up show that earned her recognition before, as she continues her exploration of storytelling which began with last year’s Touchdown.

“For me a story is a more realistic way of putting together a show,” she says.

“You don’t work on a story the same way you work from joke-to-joke. You have to build it and sculpt it very carefully. You can’t test out small bits and pieces on stage.”

She sees A Day In October as a natural progression of what she had been doing previously in stand-up.

“My shows were a collection of short stories and jokes in between,” she says.

“To have a beginning, a middle and an end covering the entirety of the hour presented a whole new set of challenges. You have to keep the listener interested, you have to work on the characters a lot more, and you have to build to the story events a lot more carefully. It was hard work, but I enjoyed the writing.”

Set during a teenage summer in 1980s Newcastle, Australia, where Kendall grew up, it focuses on the relationship between the narrator and her secret best friend, the bullied George Peach.

“I love that juxtaposition of the sunshiney beach culture and the reality of unemployment at the time,” she says. “It’s a comedy show, but it has a very dark underbelly to it. It informed the tone of writing the show.”

Although she admits she found it easy to write the character of George as she had him placed in her head very early on.

The biggest challenge was her own bad behaviour in the piece.

“As long as you’re honest and truthful people will go with you,” she says. “I was behaving like a jerk, but it’s okay because... It’s when it’s inexplicable that people react badly. It’s like the problem with a lot of romantic comedies – often you don’t see why two characters fall in love.

“Everybody loves Four Weddings And A Funeral, but I can’t for the life of me see why Hugh Grant ended up with Andie McDowell. He should have ended up with Kristin Scott Thomas – she’s a better written character and more interesting. There was no sense, other than that is where the plot had to go.

“The problem I had was making sure I wasn’t so unlikeable that people gave up on the story because the narrator was such a s***head.”

Telling a story she had to learn a whole new discipline – previously alien to her as a stand-up comic.

“Where the story gets serious I had to learn not to panic and race through it,” she says. “As a comedian hearing people not laughing you start thinking ‘they hate me!’

“I had to allow the audience to breathe and myself to breathe too. The show does have a big tone shift in it – I had to not panic about that and not speed up because I thought everyone was having a terrible time.”

There is something hot-wired into an audience’s psyche as soon as a story is mentioned.

“The most natural human reaction is to lean forward,” she says. “It’s a really lovely reaction. We are groomed from an early age to tell a story – it’s a way to make sense of the world. We constantly tell each other stories – I guess to try to figure out what this is.”

Starts 7.30pm, tickets £14.50/£12.50. Call 01273 709709.

*The Guide has just heard today (Fri 16) that Sarah Kendall has had to cancel her appearance at Brighton Comedy Festival due to ill health.