JLR is doing the terrible wonderful thing of performing all 10 of his previous Fringe shows this Fringe, which, fair play to the man, you have to admire the ambition. I’m going twice during the proper Fringe trip, but it is a very happy coincidence that in the 24 hours in which I’m making a flying visit to see Alasdair lies All I Wanna Do Is etc., my favourite of his shows and maybe one of my favourite things I’ve ever seen at the Fringe. Obviously we’re going.
This is, I think, the fourth time I’ve seen it - once in preview, once at its original Fringe run, once on tour in Bristol, and here and now. But significant time has passed since that tour show, so it’s a lot of fun to revisit it with somewhat hazy memories. There are specific jokes I am waiting for, specific bits I vaguely remember, and bits I have completely forgotten about.
It’s… it’s just brilliant. Endlessly inventive, incredibly funny in so many different ways, manages to have a genuinely emotional bit in it that’s incredibly underplayed (his effective coming out as bi did register with me back in 2018 as a thing that felt familiar, so it’s interesting to revisit it now, especially as in my head it was a much more integral part of the show, not the almost throwaway line it is here), and sincere through its absurdism. It’s very noticeable how much JLR enjoys writing to a list - insults, curses, Spice Girls, alternate universes. Fun inside baseball.
It’s curious to watch him do this again after 6 years which is, it turns out, much longer than you’d think it is. There’s two elements to this, both in the effective memorisation trick of pulling off some quite intricate bits that he wouldn’t have done in years, but also in how he approaches the material. I’d really like to have seen some of his earlier shows in this run, to see how that difference changes with the really old stuff.
The greatest thing, though, is being able to share this with Alasdair, in both senses of the word. The getting to see our first Fringe show together, but also the curation aspect of it, getting to show him something that means something to me, to be able to discuss it on the street afterwards, all of that. It is sad that we won’t get loads more of these, at least this year, but it is very happy that we at least get this.