There’s breaking the bank to perform at the fringe – then there’s risking your life. In its circuitous way, John Tothill’s new show recounts the drugs trial he recently underwent for ready cash, and how things didn’t go to plan. It did fund this festival run, at least – which, irony of ironies, is now waylaid by ill-health, with Tothill cancelling performances to undergo surgery for a burst appendix. One can imagine his nose wrinkling with distaste at this development. An aesthete and hedonist of the old school, Tothill’s is a life of the mind and the spirit, on which the appendix should properly never seek to impose itself.
Consider it a triumph of that spirit, then, that – performing last weekend with what we now know to have been punctured innards – Tothill delivered another effervescent set to stand alongside last year’s eye-catching debut. His is a voice like no one else’s: foppish, erudite, self-delighted (“I adore to be alive!”) and utterly charming. There is nowhere Tothill would rather be than here, no audience he’d rather be with than us. Must the show end after an hour? Blame Protestantism for that. Tothill wishes it could last the rest of all our lives.
