Review: Seymour Mace Does Drawring

It all begins so peacefully. Pre-show the meditative theme from ‘80s TV institution The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross wafts around The Stand 2, but that’s then rudely replaced with loud rock music and Seymour Mace, bounding on in a disguise he’s largely drawn himself. In fact, most of this show is Mace revealing stuff he made earlier. But Blue Peter it definitely isn’t.

Our host – imagine a downtrodden Vic Reeves, channelling David Shrigley – has apparently just completed a fine art degree, after stand-up got stale and he found himself regurgitating old bits onstage. So he turned to the visual arts, and these are the results. Seymour Mace Does Drawring is essentially the same as the big Grayson Perry event up the road, if that was only on for an hour a day and involved Grayson explaining each piece while calling people cunts in between, Grayson Perry included. 

The title is slightly misleading, as Mace only does a bit of actual draw(r)ing along the way, and the show drifts late on, as he exhausts his own enthusiasm for the existing ones. Thankfully, a lot of those works are horrifically funny anyway – the condemned pigeon is genuinely haunting – and his assertion that a sketch pad can help anyone's mental health is a thread worth pursuing further. 

An unfinished masterpiece, then? This is more of a rough draft, but one well worth an hour of your chin-stroking time.