Seymour Mace: Happypotamus

It’s raining again. The pavements are crowded. The gutters are clogged with sodden flyers, the pulpy remains of a thousand frustrated dreams. As the Fringe gallivants towards its final week, sleep has been scarce. Money’s running out. Good job then, that wild-eyed Geordie crackpot Seymour Mace is in town with new show Happypotamus to bring a little funshine into everyone’s lives. Except… “It’s not a fucking show about happiness!” screams a microphone-free Mace. “It’s about depression!” A manic smile. “But that doesn’t shift tickets so well.”

In reality, with the windows down and daylight streaming into the snug Stand II, Mace’s nonsense-spouting shouty show—about his attempts to shake off the black dog and cheer the hell up—is surprisingly spirit-lifting. The revelations (“happiness comes from inside you”) aren’t exactly worldview-altering, but the journey there’s a fun ride.

There’s a dally with some frightening anti-depressant drugs (side effects: “abnormal eye accommodation, the production of breast milk in males and a deceased sex drive – not decreased, you understand, deceased!”), then Mace invites us into his experimental art gallery (which includes his crowd-pleasing sketch of a bat crossed with a chicken interbred with a police officer – aka “PC Batchicken”) before a story about avoiding a potentially fatal car crash (“I nearly killed my two Australian passengers… it was FUCKING GREAT!”) jolts him from his gloomy slump.

It’s brilliantly eccentric at times, if occasionally hampered by its sticky adherence to a theme, but Mace—as evinced by his section of “impressionations”, starring a sneeze in slo-mo—is very much a man in his own world. And thank goodness for that.