I’m not a fan of audience participation. A traumatic encounter with a clown at a circus when I was 5 has left me with a pronounced dislike of being picked on by performers, yet when the audience isn’t very large, it sometimes can feel unavoidable.
While Julia Sutherland’s set had the potential to have an intimate, conversational atmosphere, her slightly awkward questioning of the audience meant the comedian wasn’t the only one who was feeling ‘exposed’.
Sutherland’s act is hard to summarise, as it felt quite disjointed. Rather than effecting smooth and coherent transitions between topics, she handed an audience member a clipboard containing pre-written questions and insisted they ‘interview’ her. This felt like a gimmick at best, a necessary aid at worse – yet remembering to prompt the ‘interviewer’ seemed to actually distract her just as she was reaching a flow.
Sutherland is certainly entertaining, but for a stand-up, she’s funny in the way your friend telling the story of a terrible date in the pub is funny, or the way a child daftly performing for laughs is funny. It makes you chuckle, but there’s a little too much awkward effort there to affect genuine belly laughter.
Too large a bulk of her routine was not substantive content, but humorous snippets gathered from elsewhere. Rather than seeming like an innovative adoption of multimedia, the use of a TV screen felt like a somewhat laboured mechanism to fill out an hour-long show. The multiple props – including a song lyric book, guitar and cape (which was fabulous, in fairness) – began to seem necessarily included in order to prop up, and flesh out, the performance.
A significant amount of time was dedicated to trawling through Facebook comments on a video she produced for BBC Scotland. Views were obsessively counted and comments studied in detail. It was reminiscent of Joe Lycett’s tendency to read out and dissect emails in his routines – but without the witty analysis. Instead, Sutherland’s use of this tactic felt like an awkward diversion, bringing to mind more a friend obsessing over a text from an ex rather than a witty comedic gambit.
A closer demographic to Sutherland might find her more relatable, and therefore more funny, but for me Exposed fell short of its potential through a distractible indecision of what it was as a show.
Julia Sutherland: Exposed is playing 1st - 12th, 14th - 27th August at 1.30pm, at the Guilded Balloon Teviot (The Turret)
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