It’s called semantic satiation, when you say a word so many times it starts to lose its meaning. Something of that effect is on display in this new touring show, which asserts – over and over again, in one life-and-work yarn after another – that Dawn French Is a Huge Twat. The young Dawn tries to be pretty by twitching her nose? Twat. Actor Dawn screws up the American accent for Kenneth Branagh’s movie Death on the Nile. Huge twat. Ageing Dawn misunderstands her doctor’s diagnosis when he treats her gammy knee. Twat twat twat.
If the object is to ingratiate herself with the audience (as if she needed to), French’s twat conceit works a treat: this is an enormously likable show, whose host revels in tales of her own self-mortification. But the motif is stretched way beyond breaking point. A significant handful of French’s anecdotes don’t demonstrate twattishness in any way – like the one about refusing to perform a sexist line in a Comic Strip script, or the one about Dustin Hoffman’s eccentric visit to her West End dressing room. Engaging stories they may be. Illustrations of French’s supposed “staggering stupidity”, they are not.
No matter. The point is to encourage us all to be more at ease with our social awkwardness, our self-consciousness, our proneness to gaffes – to celebrate that shared idiocy rather than stage-managing Insta perfection for likes, which the 64-year-old deplores. That’s a cause I can get behind, and – amid the more generic showbiz fare – French isn’t short of stories that fly its flag. Her tale of filming saucy scenes with co-star Phil Daniels offers a perspective on staged intimacy you seldom hear, as well as delivering the required levels of daftness on French’s part. A disastrous audition for Mamma Mia! is brought vividly to life as our host re-enacts the out-of-body experience of listening to herself mangle one Abba song after another.
Then there’s the showstopping story of her and then-husband Lenny Henry’s appearance at a star-studded fancy dress ball for Elton John’s 50th birthday. French spins this one into a mini-masterpiece of public humiliation, heaping detail upon self-abasing detail, and – ticklishly, brilliantly – withholding photographic corroboration until the last possible moment.
Next to that, a few of the anecdotes feel low-wattage: some mildly amusing things that happened, several of them lacking punchlines or big payoffs – for all that French deploys and re-deploys the exclamation “what a twat!” to serve in lieu. But those accounts are usually redeemed by French’s bubbliness and congeniality, an assertively unstarry manner bolstered by her story of haplessly fangirling the singer Norah Jones. And independently of the tales French tells, it’s usually fun just to revisit the shows, sketches and comedy collectives she’s been part of over her 40-year career: a fresh-faced Ade Edmondson here, a boyish Hugh Laurie there. Jennifer “Fatty” Saunders almost everywhere.
Finally, as French ranges across The Vicar of Dibley, Murder Most Horrid and Harry Potter (clips on an upstage screen), it’s as a compendium of often self-mocking showbiz reminiscences, more than as a testament to twattishness, that the show is best enjoyed. And enjoy it you likely will, French being a super trouper, and director Michael Grandage steering proceedings towards a feelgood, redemptive finale, with a standing ovation very much built-in. Huge Twat she may be. Entertainer to her bones, on this evidence, French unmistakeably is.
Dawn French Is a Huge Twat is at Northcott theatre, Exeter, on Sunday; New theatre, Peterborough, on Thursday; then touring.
