Spoken word review: Howard Marks

"HAVE you ever done a whitey?" one bloke quizzed Howard Marks, pictured below, during the Q&A session finale (just once, he admitted). The questions got more penetrating. "Have you ever kissed a corpse?" (only his parents). "Is it true that you met Biggie Smalls in prison?" (yes – he taught the late rapper how to punctuate correctly). Such was the level of enlightenment the cult of cannabis sought from its totemic figurehead, nickname Mr Nice.

Mild-mannered Welshman Marks was the world's biggest drug smuggler in the 1980s, before being banged-up in the United States for seven years. He's now a best-selling author and world-famous live raconteur, whose life story was recently turned into a movie biopic (as lazily acknowledged here with a screening of the trailer).

Somewhere between stand-up comedy and spoken word performance, this show was neither here nor there. If you've read any of Marks's books, then you basically didn't miss much, as the grizzled Rolling Stone lookalike disjointedly recounted well-trodden anecdotes – growing acres of hashish on Swiss Alps, "spunking" 100,000 advances from his publishers in months, that kind of thing – in his baked, lilting Welsh burr.

Laughs were scarce, no matter how stoned the audience was – and you could have sliced the smoky air outside during the interval with a butter knife. Marks's karmic world view is admirable, and if you were to invite any former drug baron to meet your mum then it'd definitely be this one.

Yet for a chap who has lived more in his 65 years than an average man might in ten lifetimes, he isn't half a snooze.