You can fall victim to your own high standards – and few comics have set higher standards than Jordan Brookes. A new show from the 2019 comedy award champ is an event, at which half the fun is seeing how he’s monstered the form into some unforeseen new shape. If this year’s offering, The Part of You That’s Always Screaming, were delivered by any other comic, I’d be hailing it as one of the twistiest and deepest-thinking hours on the fringe. But it lacks Brookes’ usual ambition: its delivery is fairly conventional; things aren’t pushed as far as we expect.
It’s all relative, mind you: this is still a set in which, at one unexpected moment, our comedian turns down the lights, turns up some disturbing industrial soundscape, and jerks threateningly across the stage. But then we act differently when we’re being watched – which is Brookes’ point here, in a show that worries intensely at the relationship between selfhood and being seen. It’s structured, deliciously, around an innocuous experience on a train, when Brookes snacking on a croissant becomes a performative act, awkwardly positioned as he is between the window and a window-gazing fellow passenger.
