Towards the end of this enthralling monologue by Marcelo Dos Santos, the unnamed character played by Samuel Barnett goes for cognitive behavioural therapy. A questionnaire asks him to grade, out of 10, his fears that something terrible will happen. He plumps for 10 then scrawls a smily face alongside it.
He’s a professional comedian after all – or as he puts it, “professional neurotic”. Barnett’s shirt has its own Comedy Store-esque laughing logo on the back, with red lips, heart-shaped tongue and bright white teeth. And Dos Santos’s play dives into the compulsion to make others laugh, from using humour as a defence mechanism to exerting control on your surroundings.
Staged at a festival where comedy shows outnumber theatre, the play offers a closer analysis of joke-craft than the psychology of standup. It’s likely to influence audiences’ appreciation of the next act they watch – and invites them to unpick the structure of Dos Santos’s measured, slightly too neat script.
As if we were at a comedy club night, Barnett starts at a mic stand. The plot grows from a familiar culture-clash routine as he, a self-deprecatory, weak-chinned Brit, falls for an all-American doctoral student who, in one of Dos Santos’s best lines, looks “like the guy Michelangelo dumped David for when he got rich and famous”.
The remarkable thing about Barnett’s performance is how he has mastered the delivery, timing and register of a seasoned observational comedian. He has an instant rapport with the audience and intuitively responds to an interjection from the crowd. In a series of gags, we see the comedian revel in his own ridiculousness, work up mock rage complete with throbbing neck vein, and fire off dry observations on his addiction to hook-up culture.
Barnett undercuts it with just the right amount of fragility and Dos Santos’s script, which finds the standup rewinding and refreshing his material, sparingly reminds us that confessional comedians can be unreliable narrators. Separating the embellishments from the authenticity is part of the game here.
As the swooshes of Max Pappenheim’s sound design shift between scenes, Matthew Xia’s adrenalised staging matches the wired feeling of a comedy club – although the standup’s colleagues are rather thinly drawn. The pace also matches the swiftness of the unpredictable casual sex encounters engineered by the app-addicted comedian, where he loses the control he finds at the mic. The end result is a compelling and troubling character study with some killer punchlines.
Feeling Afraid as If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen is at Roundabout @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
