Andrew Lawrence
Rapid delivery and meticulous timing barely make up for a forgettable script
| 03 Aug 2007
Some performers are plainly unfortunate. As if it were not bad enough to be weedy, short, low in sperm count, high pitched in voice, prepubescent at the age of 27 and with hair the “colour of sexual rejection,” Andrew Lawrence plays nightly in a sparsely decorated portaloo at temperatures exceeding that which human sweat glands can possibly abate.
Leaving his guitar firmly in storage and only treating us to a paltry four bars of his soaring voice, Lawrence’s act inescapably seizes on his adversity with fluency and verve. But the hair, the stature, the chipboard walls and the £450 per week flat in Leith all prove easily and predictably felled targets that fail to convince the flagging audience to garnish his set with more than a choice selection of belly laughs.
With his theme, Lawrence elects to plump for the usual skipping ropes of the comedy circuit: the poor and the middle class. But the irony behind his seemingly well-to-do existence, although constantly threatening to emerge, never surfaces. Indeed, reading any press on Lawrence’s previous shows could easily persuade the first timer that they had been wafted into the wrong venue. "Demonic” this performance is not. In fact, as the audience titter at Lawrence’s bizarre request for a standing ovation in response to the announcement of his MySpace address, you can’t help feeling that he has left far too much of the enfant-terrible behind him.
However, in spite of the many chasms that Lawrence has managed to fall head-first into in writing his second major show, it is the rapidity of delivery and meticulous timing with which he has made his name that shine through a fairly forgettable script.
Leaving his guitar firmly in storage and only treating us to a paltry four bars of his soaring voice, Lawrence’s act inescapably seizes on his adversity with fluency and verve. But the hair, the stature, the chipboard walls and the £450 per week flat in Leith all prove easily and predictably felled targets that fail to convince the flagging audience to garnish his set with more than a choice selection of belly laughs.
With his theme, Lawrence elects to plump for the usual skipping ropes of the comedy circuit: the poor and the middle class. But the irony behind his seemingly well-to-do existence, although constantly threatening to emerge, never surfaces. Indeed, reading any press on Lawrence’s previous shows could easily persuade the first timer that they had been wafted into the wrong venue. "Demonic” this performance is not. In fact, as the audience titter at Lawrence’s bizarre request for a standing ovation in response to the announcement of his MySpace address, you can’t help feeling that he has left far too much of the enfant-terrible behind him.
However, in spite of the many chasms that Lawrence has managed to fall head-first into in writing his second major show, it is the rapidity of delivery and meticulous timing with which he has made his name that shine through a fairly forgettable script.