As you walk into the venue there’s a man in a baseball cap, showing people towards their seats. Your eyes get used to the dark and you realise it’s Tim Key. Famously unassuming, a journeyman, able to blend into the background, Key lurks in the shadows – seeing how close to his audience he can get.  He welcomes people with a gentle smile.

 

Until the lights come on. Suddenly we have showbiz Key, stamping his boot, snapping at the audience. He’s irascible, this mid-life version of our beloved comedy poet – and it isn’t really clear why.

 

Key has a swig of strong lager and pulls a pack of cards from his pocket. There are poems written on each one. Little vignettes, beautifully observed moments of life in cafes, tiny observations peppered with jokes.

 

Hurling each completed poem to the floor, Key strolls around the stage, alternately cursing and bragging about his showbiz life. He’s written a feature film, and he wants us to know it. He reminds us how he won the Perrier Award in Edinburgh, when it was still called the Perrier.

 

His mixture of poetry, comedy, observation and attitude is still as potent as ever. And he gets a lot of massive laughs about the frustrations of being mildly famous. Sometimes the joke is on him, sometimes it is on us, but Key’s mesmeric idiocy keeps catching us out.

 

But there’s something odd about his crowd work. Key repeatedly asks members of the audience their age. And the ages of their parents. Are their parents alive or dead? Do they have grandparents?

 

Outbursts of temper keep exploding, as he rails against the passing of the years. He’s young, he’s still young but time is passing. He has to stand in front of us for 58 minutes. That’s another hour gone.

 

There’s a gorgeous hypnotic quality to Key’s rhythms. Poems, jokes, observations merge together into one continuous flow. Little everyday phrases are repeated – conversations in the coffee shop become like verses in a song. So what is the anger about?  Is it really just the frustration of a life in the spotlight?  Is it artistic ambition?  Could it be the fundamental indignity of being a clown?

 

Finally Key pulls back the curtain and reveals a real, life-threatening event, which has had serious and lasting consequences on his life. He continues to make us laugh, even as he drops this emotional depth charge, which suddenly makes sense of everything that has gone before.

 

As the show ends, Key picks up the scattered playing card poems from the floor of the stage. It’s time to restack the deck and get ready to face another day.

 

 

 

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