Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Seemingly doomed to present the creakiest, most ill-advised, feline-related show since 2019’s megaflop cinematic adaptation of Cats featuring Taylor Swift, Judi Dench et al, Phil Ellis has truly embraced the concept of successive false starts.
The supposed big reveal of his lumpily bulging costume and the suggestion that it’s all that’s left over from a high-concept, moggy-related production he ditched on a catty point of principle, ensures that his Excellent Comedy Show opens with a limp, buffoonish whimper.
However, for Ellis, failure is always the brand. A decade on from his outlier success at the Edinburgh Fringe, scooping the panel prize for his twisted children’s show Funz and Gamez, he’s a 42-year-old man living with five other people in a houseshare, not even a full fridge shelf to call his own. Yet this latest, caterwauling cry from his loser’s soul earned him a best show nomination at last year’s Fringe. And it’s easy to see why. If it perhaps takes longer for the crowd to tune into its anti-humour frequencies on tour, outside of Edinburgh’s more experimental and comedy-saturated environment, after more than an hour of his semi-pathetic capering and self-degradation, everyone’s fully on board.
Accompanied by his band, solitary multi-instrumentalist Cammy Sinclair, he harks back to a faded era of light entertainment, with most routines capped not by a big punchline, but a more-or-less sincerely belted out, karaoke-style blast of chart-topping pop or rock, at no point distracting from the cracks in his material and psyche.
But while Ellis foregrounds his low status, outing his scumbag grandfather, suggesting the audience are right to give some routines little, and maintaining that he’s incapable of punching down, with no other targets socially beneath him, there’s some delightful whimsy in the self-pity. Having reflected on the possibility of food in his cupboards outliving him, he extends his grievance against the groceries into a wonderfully dark take on the possibility of him adopting. A lament for his childlessness and a scene he witnesses of a little girl and her father reunited are built up as humanity at its most beautiful, as he exquisitely almost sustains his show of earnestness. Tackling the hot topic of men’s mental health meanwhile, he’s both deliciously selfish, insensitive and hilariously ill-fated.
Notwithstanding his heroically crap, improvised rap finale, it’s the show’s standout routine, emblematic of Ellis’ deceptively sharp writing and endearingly committed performance.
