Camden Fringe Review: Unweaving Rainbows @ Camden Head

A stand up show dissecting stand up's norms, picking over past failures and pushing through expectations and taste to 'unweave' the form and still make people laugh is a brave endeavour. Especially when several people sit down and realise they're in the wrong show and so didn't even actively volunteer for such comedic experimentation.

James Mason is on the verge of giving up stand up and his down low delivery suggests wilful comedy self-destruction. His opening gambit contemplating sex with geriatrics given his failure to sustain a relationship, despite his leather jacket, sets the bleakly amusing tone. Frustrated at being tagged 'mildly outrageous' he lays into his own comedy career - as well as his previous career in shops - admitting he's 30, still living at home and now getting ID-ed in Waitrose for wine. It's fitting that two of the accidental audience members leave during his set reinforcing Mason's desire to nullify any sense of achievement in comedy. Job done! Fortunately, the majority appreciate his dark line in self deprecation and gerontophilia.

Stuart Laws is the Energiser Bunny by comparison, warmer and dafter yet equally disillusioned by jokes - a "recovering comedian" struggling to reconstruct himself with some semblance of an act. Eschewing gags he meanders through an extended rambling fantasy conceit involving all the audience in singlets drinking Nesquik and an encounter with a elf at work. He picks apart picking on the audience by, well, picking on them but with imagination and without terrorist intent.

The Dawkins reference eluded us till we read the show blog later (good concept) and if this is work in progress we'd like to see more. Perversely endearing, the pair of them.

Catch Unweaving Rainbows tonight at 8.45pm, Camden Head, NW1. All tickets at The Camden Fringe are £7.50. Find out what else is on at www.camdenfringe.org.

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