Zachary Ruane @ Pleasance Courtyard
Aunty Donna's Zachary Ruane makes a solo debut with an expertly honed and meticulously fine-tuned show
Zachary Ruane’s most notorious creative project is the monumental sketch group Aunty Donna, which defined an era of sketch comedy and millennial absurdism. He is by every metric more than entitled to the accolade of “comedy genius”; fittingly, that is the premise of his debut solo tour. Pitched as a TED Talk-style seminar from one of the medium's most valuable assets, Comedy is a meta-style hour about, well, comedy. It’s a juggernaut undertaking, but who better equipped for it than a middle-aged Australian out of breath after running up the staircase into the crowd?
Spanning across multiple genres of comedy, the show panders to all of the sketch inclinations that made Aunty Donna so successful. The show is familiar in its fast pace, theatrical beats and cheeky surrealism, but it's also a cohesive stand-up project focused solely on Ruane’s creative vision.
His performance is crucial to the show’s strength, in both the energy pumped into each second of it and the gleeful delight relentlessly flooding out of him as he does so. It’s this boundless euphoria emanating off Ruane that prevents the show's premise feeling tainted by ego, overly convoluted, or pandering to comedy fanatics alone. Flitting quickly from songs to animations, political rants to slapstick, the show is meticulously fine-tuned and expertly honed, while feeling simultaneously slapdash, chaotic and natural. Ruane’s prowess on stage is unparalleled, and even when diving into the craziest rabbit holes – there has seldom been a show that imbues the audience with such confidence that the payoff will always be worth it.
Every moment of Comedy pays off in dividends, glued together with buckets of charm and a stunning gag rate, firing off from every direction. If Zachary Ruane’s credentials as a comedy master were ever in doubt, this show both ironically and unironically shuts them down.
Touring to Soho Theatre, London, 1-5 Sep; Hen & Chickens, Bristol, 7 Sep; The Lowry, Manchester, 8 Sep; The Ambassadors, Dublin, 10 Sep