The cliche of the sad clown – the jester who uses laughs to paper over the cracks in their deeply flawed personality – is ubiquitous probably because it’s largely true. Ask most standup comedians, and they’ll likely agree that underneath the wit lies a lot of pain and heartbreak. Certainly this is the starting point of Marcelo Dos Santos’s tightly conceived one-person show, Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen. It establishes a mood of tottering anxiety from the outset, and only darkens and complicates it therein.
One of the first hurdles is the fact that Dos Santos isn’t the performer of his (seemingly autobiographical) standup routine. The person playing the role of the unnamed comedian is UK actor Samuel Barnett, who launches into a monologue about dating an American man suffering from cataplexy, a condition whereby laughter causes extreme muscle paroxysm. So we have the comedian and the boyfriend who can’t laugh.
