Alongside a new writers’ club called Itch, Phil Nichol concurrently recreates the first and only performance of Bobby Spade’s Crazytown. Kerouac meets Hunter S in the 1970s; never has a Perrier winner this side of Dan Kitson been so experimental, and this show acts as an extended hyperlink to the life and times of Spade, as if Nichol is telling the audience to google him when they get home that night.
The fourth wall is nonexistent, breached as it is by a gunman and a heckle of “read the fockin’ poeme” from an inebriated punter accurately recreating the scene of an old-fashioned audience. Craziness, loneliness, pain and suffering all emerge from Spade’s life and, in Nichol’s hands, he is terrifically verbose, a man whose talent is matched only by lunacy. The musicians backing Nichol/ Spade are technically flawless, the pianist of whom bleeds as he plays, the victim of the gunshot as he is. Nichol’s face is a joy to watch, holding his expression as well as his audience perfectly. The assonance slips from his tongue and he contorts his body like Houdini.
For a man denied the success that comes with kudos of a big award (he was murdered in the cut of Buzzcocks he was on), this is a brave and vehemently anti-commercial performance befitting of the Stand’s lustre. The Canadian, it seems, has struck back. An utter joy.
