Comedy / Colston Hall
Review: Robert Newman, The Lantern, Bristol
On the great branching tree of careers in British comedy, Robert Newman is somewhat cicada-like. His first show in seven years is typical of a man who has disappeared from the circuit for long periods while incubating other projects – chiefly book writing and left-wing political activism – since his brief, commercially barnstorming 90s partnership with David Baddiel.
Like his two shows on the West’s oil wars some ten years ago, Newman’s New Theory of Evolution has a bold, zeitgeist-challenging focus. Most of what we think we know about evolution is wrong, says Newman, and the idea that it is chiefly driven by red-blooded competition is a dangerous fairytale whose popularity is explained less by its scientific credibility than by its usefulness in propping up capitalist fundamentalism.
Newman is keen for us to know that isn’t something he’s gleaned from an “anarcho-feminist pamphlet, printed in menstrual blood, bought in a pop-up bookshop on Stokes Croft”. It’s a genuine scientific controversy that too few people are aware of, leaving the selfish gene theory popularised by Dawkins to ‘win’ almost by default.
Newman is a twinkly, eccentric and arresting character onstage. Like his lefty stablemate Mark Thomas, he punctuates his potentially dense material with enough laugh-out-loud punchlines that we don’t feel hectored, as well as some neat callbacks and Paul Merton-esque flights of surreal fancy. Also like Thomas, he could be accused of preaching to the converted; and his deftly deployed arsenal of stand-up tricks probably feels more original to his audience of sympathetic politicos than it would to an audience of die-hard comedy fans.
But there’s a lot of fun to be had here, most of all in the esoteric jokes that a comedian can make to a loyal audience that he trusts to come with him (this reviewer loved his science-nerd asides, as when he describes Watson and Crick being “famously the fourth and fifth people to discover the molecular structure of DNA”). It’s a pleasingly odd, witty and convincing show that privileges the “survival of the misfits” over the “survival of the fittest”. Long may this defiant misfit of the UK comedy scene survive.
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