‘I’ve just been sick behind the curtain.” It’s an inauspicious start to a gig. But Lou Sanders is not very well and, being Lou Sanders, isn’t keeping the fact to herself. That makes for an anxious opening five minutes, with an audience uncertain whether to laugh at Sanders or call her a doctor. Happily, she rallies to deliver a tight hour about her life during the pandemic and the relative attractions of those two competing impulses, love and fear.
It is characteristic Sanders territory: she’s telling tales about her rackety life, and psychoanalysing them as she does so. Tonight’s tale is not especially eventful: it’s about Sanders, 36 and seven years single, taking up roller skating and falling for a 26-year-old. We might wish for a more dramatic narrative arc, but there’s no denying that our host – with her compulsive self-scrutiny and heightened sense of her own daftness – makes her story a pleasant way to pass the time.
