Colin Hoult has been performing at the fringe for 20 years, but never with what most comics give us at the start: a solo show, about himself. Now, the sketch act turned alter ego of ageing thespian Anna Mann steps out from behind the masks, with a standup set about his own eccentric family background. It’s an hour that quietly casts its spell, as detail upon detail is added to a telling portrait, with a strong sense of place, of an unexceptionally difficult working-class childhood. Back in 80s Nottingham, “Little Col” (named after his dad) grows up in a family with neither language nor understanding of their considerable idiosyncrasy – or as we now comprehend it, neurodiversity.
First up, it’s fun for Hoult-watchers to see how his own standup persona overlaps with that of theatrical grande dame Mann. No surprise there, given that her swansong performance (comedy award-nominated at Edinburgh two summers ago) confessed to the slippage between character and creator. So here comes Colin, almost as camp and just as conspiratorial with his audience, spiriting us back to a troubled childhood in the shadow of Mapperley mental health hospital. Not just physically (his window overlooked it) but psychologically: “he’s not right”, his family mutter of Little Col, threatening him with expulsion to the former lunatic asylum. That’s a bit rich: he’s not the one staging séances on Christmas Day, communing with gorillas.
Hoult’s show circles that anecdote and its dramatis personae: his brother, obsessed with a Wetherspoon’s £5 meal; his parodically pessimistic mum. But the show’s strongest presence, his dad, remains on the mayhem’s margins, “the only normal one among us”, the family’s lodestar. Now a father himself, Hoult reckons here with his distant dad – and wonders how to parent his own kids as their nonconformities swim into view. Given the depth of feeling at play behind the upbeat, weren’t-we-loopy comedy, it’s odd that Col Jr undermines the emotional significance of a scene at his father’s deathbed. That’s a rare misstep in a vividly realised show about class, family and the great merciful change that’s come about in how we consider difference from the norm.
• At Soho theatre, London, 23-28 September. Then touring from 3 October
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