Russell Kane: Manscaping

2010’s deserved Foster’s Comedy Award-winner returns this year with something of an identity crisis.

He’s had a busy 12 months having lost love, found it, hit the skids, hit the TV screens and booty-shaken his best Beyoncé moves for the Beeb’s lurid Let’s Dance for Comic Relief (“a desperate bid for mass acceptance”). But mostly, having passed his comedy A-Levels though not yet ready to fill stadiums, he’s just been wondering where he fits in.

The misleadingly metaphorical title of the show concerns this feeling of waywardness, each phase of Kane’s life becoming a short-lived, tangential chapter, a new “manscape”.

It’s an odd conceit, but it matters little as Kane—in skinny jeans and sporting a tidal wave quiff (“the bastard son of Jedward in the clothes of an 11-year-old”)—launches into his trademark high-energy raconteuring, skipping, prancing and darting across the stage throwing gags and asides around like a hyperactive water sprinkler.

There’s a hilarious anecdote about his first one-night stand in years, another about a brush with a well-to-do bigot in a first class train carriage and, as ever, Kane’s dad—not to mention his own preoccupations with class and his own fey, artsy leanings—get a look in.

It’s wonderfully engaging and, at times, refreshing vulnerable – Kane appears genuinely affronted when two girls inexplicably walk out, and at the end, seems utterly unwilling to leave the stage on which he’s so clearly adored.

Once again, Kane mentions his identity crisis. In the audience, who he is seems pretty clear to us: he’s a man at the peak of his powers.