With its back-to-basics account of who he is and where he comes from, Schalk Bezuidenhout’s set might be mistaken for a debut hour. Comedy fans will know it’s not: his UK debut was at the 2019 Edinburgh fringe, when he was already a big noise in his native South Africa. Even the uninitiated, meanwhile, might justifiably doubt that any rookie could be this good. Bezuidenhout’s excuse for now serving up his backstory is that he wants to explain himself to the new fans he acquired with his Lockdown Laughs series of pandemic-era videos.
And so he does, with a suite of stories from his schooldays and awkward youth. There’s nothing ostensibly remarkable about them: a tale here about his diffident participation in high-school long-distance running, an anecdote there about his dad grudgingly chaperoning him to a chess tournament. With Bezuidenhout, it’s all in the telling, as he role-plays to a T the snooty English (as opposed to Afrikaans) schoolkids defeating him at chess on a technicality, or the too-cool-for-school adolescents ferrying hookah smoke around a circle one snog at a time.
These are the richest sections, where defiantly uncool Bezuidenhout, dressed like a CBeebies presenter, sends up teenage pretension – singing softly to a bonfire, say, while a friend strums a guitar. Nothing so low-key from grownup Schalk, an expressive presence on stage, and in total control of his comic register, as he identifies the one audience member to regale with his startling tale of genital puppetry, or recites – one incriminating phrase after another – a pompous motivational tweet from a fellow resident of his unglamorous home town.
In a show made for South African audiences, the laughs are staggered between those who get the references immediately, and those who need a translation. No matter: Bezuidenhout’s genial manner makes that all part of the fun. More jarring is that the final 20 minutes – on the reaction of his local community to riots last summer in KwaZulu Natal, and on the 00s MTV show Pimp My Ride – bear little relation to the rest of the show. But for 40 minutes, this is a fun primer in the misfit backstory of a fast-rising talent.
At Soho theatre, London until 7 May.
