This review first appeared in the Evening Standard here.
Russell Kane has smartened up his act. The over-excited hair and youth TV T-shirts have been replaced by tidy locks and tight jackets. Kane is finally growing up and in his new show, Right Man, Wrong Age, he explains why with considerable style.
Before then there is the warm-up section chatting to the crowd and pithily pinpointing how the British are so negative compared with whooping and hollering Americans. We know it is the 40-year-old’s warm-up because he tells us. Like an Essex Stewart Lee he constantly refers to his jokes, offering his own mock-critique. Not an original tactic but still extremely funny.
In fact at times much about this set initially feels unoriginal, before our verbose host consistently pushes a familiar idea into new areas. In the run-up to the interval he explains that the way to have a perfect relationship is to find your polar opposite. He is neurotic and southern, his wife Lindsey is chilled and so Mancunian that when Kane mimics her accent her sentences end with an Oasis lyric.
These riffs could be glib men-versus-women patter yet the erstwhile Peter Pan of stand-up elevates them to the point where his thoughts resemble an essential self-help guide to life. Always lurking somewhere is the fear of becoming like his late aggressive father, a man so masculine he could put up a shelf just by looking at it and who once started an argument in a pub with a bluebottle.
The meat of the show comes after the interval when he discusses swapping all-nighters in Ibiza for staying up all night with his new baby. Parenthood is again well-trodden terrain. However, Kane offers us his own distinctive slant with Kane senior having another brief cameo when the comic begins to worry that those bluebottle-baiting genes might reappear if he had a son.
As it turned out Lindsey had a daughter. There is a notable routine explaining how to steer conception away from producing a male. I cannot vouch for the theory, but the motormouth certainly makes a sartorially elegant biology teacher. And an entertaining one too, contorting his body to ape the movements of each sperm.
There is a lot to process here, particularly when you are so busy laughing, but attention pays dividends. This is a frantic performance yet also thoughtful and reflective. Kane’s delivery is unique and when he closes by recalling his daughter’s birth you’ll discover that her delivery was rather unique too. A smart guy indeed.
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