Brian Gittins: Roadside Cafe Owner

“Knock knock! Who’s there? Linford Christie. Ooh, that’s a nice surprise!”

As jokes go, it’s not the punchiest, but then David Earl‘s wonderful character act is all about frustrating audience expectations of what an entertainer-comedian should be. Brian Gittins owns a roadside café somewhere along the A32, but dreams of a career on the stage. He’s given himself an ambitious target of playing the London Palladium within five years, but for now he has to make do with the cramped confines of the Pleasance Below. Gittins shuffles on stage in a black suit with a broken fly zip and a Union Jack bow tie (“It never hurts to have a bit of razzle dazzle”) and croakily sings an ode to the Full English Breakfast.

Earl stays fully in character throughout, and creates an extraordinary amount of audience tension by presenting us with Gittins’ sheer incompetence as a performer, snorting and giggling his way through a series of bad jokes read out from a torn scrap of paper. The tension is punctured by moments of bizarre, transgressive silliness and audience interaction involving a range of rubber masks, and the release is such that we are often thrown into fits of helpless giggles.

By the time we get to the “spectacular” musical finale, there’s also a fair amount of sympathy built up for this strange, sad figure, and the show becomes a kind of lament about the pain of dreaming unachievable dreams. Watching a personal tragedy unfold on stage has rarely been this much fun.