We’ve seen shows about trauma, depression and anxiety. What about a show exploring their blissful absolution? If that sounds like Paul Foot swimming against the comedy tide – well, it wouldn’t be a first. This determinedly whimsical figure has ploughed a far-from-the-mainstream furrow for years. But Dissolve is something different: it departs from whimsy, to address Foot’s own often painful experience of life, then a moment that (he claims) transformed that experience forever. “I’m aware it sounds kind of unbelievable,” says Foot – which, among its other qualities, is what makes this show remarkable: a standup set that leads us into the ineffable, and dares to leave us there.
What actually happened to the 49-year-old? He drip-feeds that information into this cannily constructed set, which begins with a disorientating fairytale on his mother’s knee, and proceeds via amusing if familiar material on the middle-aged and their resistance to change. Then the show throws itself into its first handbrake turn, as Foot ’fesses up to a lifetime of suffocating sadness. Living in “a volatile and erratic state for three decades” was good for his comedy, he reports, but gruelling for his life. In another artful switchback, right in the middle of an erotic fantasy about former shadow cabinet member Chuka Umunna, he then reveals its cause.
