Reviewed by: The List
Review by Jo Laidlaw | 23 February 2024
Jackson Stewart is the big spoon right enough: the self-proclaimed lanky weirdo is so tall that you fear they’ll give themselves concussion off the low ceiling of Hotel Richmond’s basement bar. Their first solo hour starts off strong: really strong actually, thanks to a succession of progressively stranger one-liners that give the audience an insight into Stewart’s brain. In fact, the first fifteen minutes or so of the set are hilarious; crowd work turns into a job interview, the whole audience argues over how to take down mythical creatures, and it must be cheering to find someone else in the world who shares one’s fear of carpet stores. Of course, producing one-liner after one-liner burns material at pace, so after this opening flurry Stewart settings into a device; they sell their soul to the devil in exchange for becoming a good comedian. This leads to a run of set pieces that ends in a gag battle for the audience’s very souls. Oh, Stewart’s funny when he flies. But this show feels slightly uneven, something of a work in progress. That’s fine though, it takes time to build an hour that can sustain the pace of Sexy Freak Of Nature’s opening bit. Lucky us, that we get to watch this unfold in front of our collective eyes, because Jackson Stewart is one funny freak.