Interview: Stuart Goldsmith

This month the Wardrobe Theatre welcomes the brilliant Stuart Goldsmith, the pin-sharp comedian and former street performer who relocated back to his native Bristol a couple of years ago (he’s a dad these days, too). Stu will be performing his new touring show Like I Mean It – and the show will be filmed for a future DVD release.

Tell us about your new material, Stu. Politics? Home life? The world according to Stu?
Well, if you want me to get technical – or at least long-winded – about it, I would say my style is: talking about a daft thing that I find inherently funny, like when you see a businessman with a rucksack, or whether Pegasus is the generic name for all winged horses or one specific one, and then using the idea as a kind of shovel to dig into how I (and hopefully other people) experience the world.
So this show is “about” the cost of compromise and how the road to happiness is kind of painful and exhausting, but the actual content is me talking about blueberries, frogs, and that thing in movies where someone passes their hand over a corpse’s eyes and they always manage to close them first time.

How is it working our back in the Bristol of your childhood? And can a comedian flourish away from the bright lights of London?
Well, that’s been an essential part of the compromise mentioned above! I love Bristol and I find it a really happy place to live, and an excellent place to bring up a child. It isn’t as convenient for a comedian as London or Manchester, mostly due to the sheer volume of gigs in those other places. I’d always advise a comic to move to a bigger city for a part of their development – comics in NYC gig several times a night – but now that I’ve established my presence globally, I see it as a fun game to try and live where I want, not where I have to. Next phase is ideally a lighthouse with a teleporter.

Where do you sit on the spectrum from ultra-political, up-to-the-minute stand-up (e.g. Ahir Shah) to ultra-confessional, my-life-is-a-bit-of-a-mess stand-up (e.g. I don’t know, John Robins?)?
Definitely at the Robins end, but as you may know that’s a particularly painful example, as John and I have very similar faces and now he’s steaming ahead profile-wise, scooping up all the pointy-foxed-face gigs!
I find that it doesn’t matter what I set out to write, it always ends up being an expression of how I’m struggling with the world, so I may as well stick with that. That said, there’s fractionally more social politics sneaking in now: there seem to be so many dickheads around these days that I find it more of an obligation to say, for example, “I believe in equality” in public, even if it seems mind-meltingly obvious.

The Wardrobe show is a DVD recording. How will that be different to a normal gig for a) you and b) the audience?
I’m really excited about this one! It’s the first time I’ve recorded my own show with a proper three-camera setup. Audience-wise it’ll be me going as hard as I usually do, and for my part it’ll be probably great fun but I imagine I’ll get the dread of cocking it up on the night. It’s daft, really: the mistakes are very often the best bits, but I have to try really hard to remember to dive into them, and not pull back and try to make it all shiny and perfect!

Stuart Goldsmith performs Like I Mean It at the Wardrobe Theatre on June 14. For more info, visit thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/stuart-goldsmith-like-mean-dvd-recording