James Acaster – Hecklers Welcome: one of the funniest and most brilliantly constructed shows of the year
Most people who attend or perform comedy don’t have a particularly complex relationship with hecklers: these schmucks are almost always drunk, never funny, often incomprehensible, but always up for trying to insert themselves into the middle of something you’ve paid to see. This sort of stuff never happens at the theatre.
Throughout his rise to become arguably England’s most widely acclaimed young comic, Acaster felt similarly, and was known to regularly sabotage his own gigs in frustration at how inconsiderate his audience could be.
Hecklers Welcome is an exceptionally rich text, but one of its major themes is a dawning of acceptance, briskly encapsulated with a great routine about the people who gum up the baggage carousel at the airport, unable to step back and wait their turn. Their selfishness may never stop making Acaster angry, but he also has to acknowledge that it’s happened every single time he has ever been to the airport. He can’t change other people, so it’s up to him to reframe the issue.
“I don’t like doing standup,” he says in this show. And he means it! But maybe there’s a way that can be reframed as well? In a series of hilarious and poignant anecdotes from his childhood, he shows how performance is connected to trauma for him, and describes the feeling of trying to protect his childhood self on stage.
For this tour, he has a set of house rules which boil down to: the audience can heckle James whenever they want, and James can’t get angry about it. And there were plenty of heckles at the Bristol Old Vic on Wednesday night, none of them wise or helpful or funny in their own right. But when one woman offensively tries to speak on behalf of Acaster’s dead grandmother, he teases out the heckle with patience, charm and genuine curiosity, in one of the best bits of extended crowdwork I’ve ever seen. In a weird way, the interruptions, while still unwelcome, are essential in allowing this show to assume its optimum form, and key to the fascinating questions it poses (and answers) about the performer/audience relationship.
A nerve-wracking final story about bullies on a train puts us all in the headspace of the scared boy that (figuratively) accompanies Acaster on stage, before beautifully illustrating the transformative importance of admitting when you’re scared. It’s a perfect thematic capper to one of the year’s funniest and most brilliantly constructed shows, and a proving ground for a radical doctrine in comedy: even the foolish, the selfish and the ignorant can and should be treated with love and respect.
Touring the UK until June 2024; jamesacaster.com
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