Rich Hall's Campfire Stories

If you’ve ever seen a Rich Hall show, you’ll appreciate how hard it is to respond with anything other than hero worship. And with this maundering, self-fictionalising celebration of storytelling, you can expect nothing less. Disillusioned by modern life, three men meet in the woods and philosophise on the Zen-like escapism of fly fishing. The premise might be well-beaten territory, but here it’s merely a vehicle for some incredibly sharp comedy dialogue.

Hall is a born straight man. Stooping and scowling, curmudgeonly yet lovable, he endures his co-stars’ ramblings with a shake of the head and a well-timed, exasperated glance that has the audience in fits. Two brilliantly unhinged foils to Hall’s no-nonsense woodsman come from long-time collaborator Mike Wilmot, the flaky, twisted urbanite, and Tim Williams, the weathered sage from the local tackle store. As Hall tos and fros between them, every exchange teems with imagination and playful surrealism.

The script is truly acrobatic. Williams masters some astonishingly dextrous tongue twisting, while a request for cigarettes — misheard as “secrets”— nudges Wilmot into a hilarious, disturbed confessional. Each story is elegantly constructed as the show wavers on the edge of profundity before inevitably collapsing into the absurd. It’s a process of build-and-release that never fails to surprise and the results are a joy to watch. None of this would be quite so special if it weren’t for the performers clearly savouring every minute: Hall, Wilmot and Williams share a chemistry that sees each constantly trying to derail the other’s performance. Silly, artful and extremely entertaining, this is a safe bet if ever there was one.