There are newcomers on the fringe delivering comedy in hand-me-down voices – and then there’s John Tothill, a rookie with a fully-formed persona that is all, and only, his own. What a treat to encounter it, in this blithely eccentric hour about pleasure, puritanism and England’s religious history.
In his day job, Tothill is a primary school teacher, and there’s something teacherly in the unlike-anyone-else demeanour he brings to the stage. Foppish, erudite, intellectually self-assured and effervescing like a freshly poured champagne, the Essex man launches straight into his thesis, which is that hedonism and transcendence died with the Reformation – but might yet be rediscovered in the nightclubs of Berlin. The problem is, he can’t keep the sermon on track, what with the audience being so gorgeous (“I’m obsessed with you”), his daily life providing such rich tangential material, and so many historical byways (“quickly on this …”) that make themselves impossible not to explore.
