THEATRE REVIEW: Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen' ★★★★

Following critical success at The Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022, where Marcelo Dos Santos’ razor-sharp play won a Fringe First for Excellence in New Writing, the story of this charmed comedian has now opened at The Bush Theatre in London, where it’s permanent set up at the venue has allowed the team to push boundaries in set and lighting in a way that was often overlooked whilst in Edinburgh due to strict parameters of time and use of space.

Unnamed throughout, Samuel Barnett’s Comedian enters with a humble stance and a cheeky grin, one which was especially welcomed from the intimate first row of audience, that doesn’t let up from start to finish. Barnett’s ability to hold us close in his story of love, revenge, and plotting the most heinous crimes gives us a joyous sense of leaning forward and allowing ourselves to be under his spell, with his movements connecting us to the story. ‘...and I’m about to kill my boyfriend’ may very well be up there for the most anticipated tag line for a show, and is it wrong to say that the delivery of the line in the show even more just whet our appetite for what the evening had in store?

Directed by Matthew Xia, the inclusion of accents and character motifs should be applauded; with so many jumps between the present and past tense, the ease of how Barnett accomplishes this is way more than any other one-person show has to handle. The art of timing and landing a punchline, especially when you are a performer who is embodying a comedian who has to make the joke land, is no easy task, but again Barnett takes the challenge and seems to have no problem in tackling a bundle of mannerisms head on. Elliot Griggs’ lighting against Kat Heath’s set brings the red-toned curtains, often seen as a staple to many comedy stages, right to the heart of the play here, with a fizziness that excites when Samuel switches between talking to us, his close confidants, before reverting back to his ‘audience’, where the bright spotlight beams down.

‘And were you terrified of what was going to happen?’ was a question asked to me later on that night after the applause had faded, and the truth is, I wasn’t, but what I was feeling was a sense of hunger for what was in store, only ramping up that feeling as the story reached it climax, and let me tell you reader, I was well and truly full on clarity, comic timing, and a temptation to book again, getting an extra fix in before the run ends on 23rd December 2023.