Review: Sam Simmons - About the Weather, Gilded Balloon Teviot

By Kate Copstick
Published on 16/08/2012 15:34

You have to give in completely to a Sam Simmons show. Don’t resist or it might hurt your brain. Just go with the flow of the silly and trust in Sam. He is quite brilliant at what he does.

* * * * *

If you let him take control of your brain and your laughing bits for just one hour, you will enjoy yourself in ways you never thought possible.

With his performances it is as if Simmons gives you a golden ticket to the crazy, sometimes tragic, always magic playground in his head, and you step into a sort of bubble created by him that doesn’t burst till the end of the show. “Am I being too silly?” Simmons inquires of the front row just before pelting the audience with shoes.

There is not a great deal of point to telling you what happens. Were I to list golden hello kitties, aptitude jingles, subliminal owls and Allen keys… you see? Now you are flicking through The Scotsman to find a review of a comic who does proper jokes. But Simmons does more than just jokes. He turns himself into the joke. Here his entire life is being narrated by the radio weatherman, who is no help when it comes to helping Sam get together with his Bus Crush Tanya. Take tissues, it doesn’t end well. But Sam is a fat yet skinny, baldy yet hairy man who loves yoghurt, hates seagulls and can’t work an alarm clock, so love is elusive.

The show is a really a comedy tapestry woven from unlikely props, crazy flights of fancy, intricately cued recordings and a plethora of strange effects to accompany Simmons’s frequent daydreaming and his mild public transport rape (I did say…you are not going to understand this till you see the show).

As always, such is the power of Simmons’s performance, by the time the spurned, speccy wannabe owl is desperately trying to flag down a bus in the rain, he has become touchingly tragicomic and the audience are emitting a strange noise that is somewhere between a laugh and an aaaah.

When you leave the Simmons bubble the real world seems beige.

Until 26 August. Today 9:15pm.