I was keen to review Chris Lynam after his inspired compering of Rimski’s Yard at last year’s festival. Instead, this is less of a review and more of a study of comic brilliance as everything goes wrong in his Nomad and Fools show, which he delivers as part of a duo with Jaime Pastor.
I don’t review every act I see at the festival (though with over 20 reviews this year, I do review a lot!). The nature of festival theatre and circus means that it sometimes feels unfair to judge a performance that has gone wrong – though there’s a balance here – but what if the falling apart is what makes it great?
Lynam arrives on stage resembling Tom Waits on acid, which is appropriate as – when the show eventually begins – he launches into a raucous, growling version of Jesse James that Waits himself would be proud of.
The song descends into deranged madness as Lynam has audience members act out the train robbery and murders central to the song with cardboard cutouts of guns and money bags before Lynam and Pastor segue back into the song.
But before we get to that point, Lynam and Pastor are so entirely beset by technical issues with nothing seeming to work on stage.
Lynam expertly kills time, ramping up the bizarre here on the A Little Sensation stage. ‘Do you swear, child?’ he asks a small child sitting in the front row. You feel he might start teaching them a few swear words, drawing nervous laughter from the audience.
‘It’s gonna be funny in a minute,’ he repeats with decreasing conviction with increasing comic effect as things spiral. Of course, it’s already funny; Lynam is an expert in clowning.
Sadly, the technical issues impact the show so much that it becomes impossible to continue as planned, so Lynam finishes with a bizarre fairytale and sends us on our way wanting more madness.
