Fresh from winning this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award, Russell Kane couldn’t hide his delight at a sold-out Corn Exchange, though modesty demanded he veiled it in self-mockery.
Whatever reservations anyone might have about the much- coveted prize, there is no denying he deserves recognition. His open-heart approach to stand-up, a medium generally defined by arrogance and bravado, is impressively bold, anger transformed into, but not masked by, hot, roaring, full-tilt comedy.
Kane’s rocky relationship with his father – the racist, thuggish Cockney antithesis to his none-more-metrosexual son – is a theme that’s run throughout his shows but here it explodes into material that manages to punch on every level. How someone can make a parent who considered a display of love never having hit his children into a comic figure – and so successfully – is a remarkable feat of determination and skill. Not once does self-awareness bleed into self-indulgence. The laughs at his learning how to conjugate “the C-word” as a child – via his gran – come long before the realisation that it’s a bit wrong.
Ferociously funny and heartbreakingly candid, Kane’s brave and beautiful show is head and shoulders above others.
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