Molly Naylor & John Osborne: Chester Literature Festival

Molly Naylor and John Osborne’s appearance at Chester Literature Festival comes just before their sitcom, After Hours, debuts on Sky1 and toward the end of their first poetry tour – along the way they have experienced mass group meditation, audience members finding romance at their gigs, and a heck of a lot of travelling.

Split into two halves, it’s impossible not to compare the styles of the poets. Osbourne is the first to take to the stage, self-depreciating and unassuming – at one point, he reads a newly penned poem from his notebook along with a running commentary on the poem’s defects – his poems reflect a series of eclectic milieu: an office worker who has opted out of the lottery winning syndicate, snorkelling in the Bahamas and an affair with a colleague. His performance shows a knack for comic timing and elicits a couple of belly laughs from the audience.

Naylor’s set feels the more personal and emotive, touching on her writing retreat in Cornwall, childhood experiences, her love for the socially awkward, and “before, during and after” poems about her first love. Naylor’s reading from Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You is the most powerful work of the event, as she poignantly recalls her experience of a bomb blast during the London terrorist attacks.

The theme of loss seems to be the uniting element of the show. Osborne’s poem Learning the Constellations shows a narrator replacing grief with an attempt to conquer nature, and Naylor tells a tale about her substituting the loss of her writing with the construction of a tragic backstory for a patron. While Osborne declares that, of the pair, Naylor is the “value for money” act, their different styles perfectly balance each other. Laughs are countered by a pull at the emotional core, crispy bacon meets the tangled web of love, and the parochial is forced to meet the universal.