When I heard, 'Dance like no one's David Callaghan' being performed at The Mash House of all places, I don't know why but it evoked images of me on a Wednesday morning getting caught in a mosh pit, being impaled by the very pen I use to write my notes. Luckily for me I was wrong but in some ways I wish it had been a mosh pit...without the impaling of course.
I honestly don't know what to say about David Callaghan's show. As a person he seems great, a little emotionally unbalanced maybe but a nice guy, nonetheless. His show on the other hand, it's hard find the words.
It is not a question as to whether David Callaghan is funny: he is. It’s a rather dry, niche humour but there's definitely an audience for it. He made references to Friends, joked about the insane amount of time we waste – Colin the Caterpillar Cake and all the knock off supermarket variations being the prime target – and he drew from personal experiences about his body image issues, moving back in with his mum and his white privilege.
David said his name means loveable problem and I have to say that’s a very apt way of describing his show as well.
The beginning of the show was fine. He performed in the attic of The Mash House, so it was quite intimate and felt very personal. He told jokes about this, that and other whilst building up to his rhythm but there in lied the problem: David's rhythm isn't funny, it's sad, a little devasting and really uncomfortable.
Here we have this 30-year-old man who got trapped on a train one day, combining both his fears of the dark and crowds, and realised he had wasted the last decade or so of his life. It took him that moment and moving back into his mum's house after being evicted, to realise he wasn't happy.
He's a man in genuine pain and his humour I'm sorry to say, isn't funny enough to mask that. His pain feels raw which, in my opinion, makes doing a show on it way too soon. I wasn't alone in thinking that either. By the end I was so lost for words and so confused by what I had seen, I had to ask another member of the audience what they thought, and I couldn't have said it better myself:
"It was a good show but when you're still working through issues and you put those issues on stage, it's messy."
There we have it, the perfect adjective to describe Dance Like No One's David Callaghan.
By the end of the show David was in tears. Whether they were real or rehearsed it felt in poor taste to laugh at the closing bit, which was David's own funeral, with the voiceover of a real priest, spouting a load of made up achievements in his honour.
If I was a friend of David's, I'd tell him to see a therapist before putting his life's pain on display for the whole of Edinburgh to see. It's completely possible to turn your pain into an art form but not whilst you're still bleeding.
I'd love to see David again in a few years’ time when he's sorted himself out, then I imagine I'd be laughing purely for the jokes and not because his pain was uncomfortable to watch.
David Callaghan performs at The Mash House everyday @ 11:55 am.
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