Review: Sean Lock/Andrew Maxwell/Nina Conti

Bristol’s own Mark Olver is a well-established face on the city’s comedy circuit, a battle-hardened compere who can be trusted to warm a local audience up nicely. Taking full advantage of his local knowledge – how many out-of-towners would be able to instantly dismiss St Philip’s as “a shithole”? – he started the evening with some lively ad-lib banter with the audience. 

Olver’s main flaw was that he doesn’t bother repeating the punters’ replies into the microphone before responding, which in a football-pitch-sized venue like the Bristol Comedy Garden’s Big Top means that those seated in the cheap seats get just one side of the conversation.

Nina Conti is a ventriloquist with a twist – although she does start her set with the requisite irritating sidekick stuck on her hand, said cheeky monkey is rapidly replaced with an audience member who is fitted with an animatronic mask. Conti then simultaneously improvises, ventroliquises and operates the mask in an impressive display of technical and comic skill which successfully walks a very narrow tightrope over a gaping abyss of failure. Conti is not just funny: she’s also very, very clever.

Rasp-voiced Dubliner Andrew Maxwell also works with no safety net. He walks onstage unarmed, forgoing a neatly scripted routine in favour of winging it off audience interaction.

Each response unlocks another door in Maxwell’s cabinet of stand-up material, launching him into discourses on everything from what would happen if Jesus were to return in present-day Texas, through a potted history of Irish sectarianism, to the incredible strength of today’s skunk (“If Bob Marley were alive today, he wouldn’t have written anything!”).  Diverting, if unavoidably a little hit-and-miss at times.

Headline act Sean Lock is a familiar face off the telly, and offers an entertaining blend of surreal observations and unlikely childhood memories. However, it did feel as though part of his act was trying out new material – a fairly unpolished and slightly cringe-inducing routine about Grindr, and a massively over-long description of an imaginary arthouse movie with a weak punchline which ended the evening on a whimper rather than a bang. Plenty of big laughs, but not the firepower you’d expect from one of the country’s A-list comedians.

Obviously at this time of year comedians will want to polish their material ahead of the Edinburgh Festival, but both Lock and Maxwell seem to have approached this show far more casually than you would hope when performing in front of 1,500 punters paying upwards of £18 a ticket each. For the final night of Bristol’s very own comedy festival in a big, expensive tent in the middle of Queen Square, this felt disappointingly like a gig in a pub. A decent gig in a nice pub, but still …

Sean Lock, Andew Maxwell and Nina Conti played Bristol Comedy Garden 2015 on Friday, July 10. For more forthcoming comedy lineups, visit b247.staging.proword.press/channel/whats-on/comedy-01