Rhod Gilbert & The Award Winning Mince Pie

Review by Frank Lazarski | 13 Aug 2008

Rhod Gilbert runs onstage, unshaven and apologising. "I’m sick," he mumbles as he swills his lager and darts his eyes. His voice is loud but oddly delicate: Welsh and nervy, with hints of an extended adolescence. It’s a well-known voice by now – it tells us another episode of ‘Frasier’ is next on Paramount Comedy and sells us the prospect of Wales as a tourist destination.

This year’s show, Rhod Gilbert and the Award Winning Mince Pie is an account of Gilbert’s attempt to live in the button-down real world. After years of lying and making-up scenarios for his stand-up (he claims that a previous Fringe Show where he discussed the merits and demerits of becoming a father for the first time was based solely upon fictional experience), Gilbert recounts his year in matter-of-fact, purely observational detail.

As a result, the material is relatively standard but handled nicely. The "my twenty-three year old girlfriend is giving me hell," "the rugger bugger at my last show was obnoxious" and the "what’s the deal with service stations?" sections are all handled with the vitriolic likeability of a young Jerry Seinfeld.

Gilbert has an ear for simple yet clever imagery – his decision that the darkest place in the world is "inside of a shoe" is playfully childlike, the culmination of a lengthy discourse on the "torch with the power of a million candles." Rhod Gilbert may not be a well man, but he knows how to enrapture a crowd.