Interview: Ben Target

Ben Target has always made comedy that marries beauty and poignancy with silliness, “performance art with punchlines”. Or “Artfool” as he's dubbed it.

Yet despite receiving an Edinburgh Comedy Award newcomer nomination in 2012, the thoughtful comic has always stood slightly apart from the comedy industry, delivering singular, eccentric, often room-splitting shows, driven by creative curiosity rather than professional ambition. 

Post-debut, he had a breakdown and attempted suicide. The support of fellow comics and a decade of “really hard work on myself” helped the 38-year-old recover. But his last proper show was in 2018 and his motivation to perform waned further during the pandemic as he lost contact with audiences. However, he did reconnect with the man that raised him. Lorenzo Wong lived in London for more than forty years as an extended part of Target's multi-generational family. But in September 2020, he was dying.

An assistant to their architect grandparents, Wong had nurtured Target and his brother. From military and draughtsman backgrounds, their parents had been “phenomenal providers”. But emotionally, “they came from a school of hard knocks” and wanted him to get a “sedate, conservative job”. When Target discovered performing, “it became very apparent I was a great disappointment”. He's since “essentially turned my back” on them.

“Lorenzo was my favourite uncle, my caregiver as a child” he reflects. “He taught me many of the things that I value today. Irreverence. Mischief. And maybe most importantly, kindness, looking after the people around you.” Since his teenage years, Target has worked in the care sector, for the elderly and children with special needs. In 2017, co-founded The Care Home Tour with Pope Lonergan, featuring comics performing for people with dementia.

When Lorenzo got back in touch, after years living alone and with his health rapidly declining, Target and his cousin resolved to move in and nurse him in his final days. “I wanted to repay the care he had gifted me as a child, when he was the only adult I felt safe around” he explains.

A humble, celibate man who'd led a monachal life, the “smart, fascinating, silly” Lorenzo was nevertheless “disrespectful of authority” and had been expelled from Cuba. In Swinging Sixties London, he “knew people from all walks of society, gangsters, landed gentry, international playboys, famous models, human rights lawyers”.

Target asked Lorenzo if he could record their conversations. “Just for myself at first, figuring it would be an oral document to put in the family archive with my grandparents' architectural drawings. Lorenzo knew no-one else would carry his legacy.”

Lockdown satisfied Target that his performing career was all but over yet he continued to direct and appear in other comedians' shows. The day Lorenzo died, he thinks he was on stage with regular collaborator Joz Norris. “Suddenly all this stuff about Lorenzo started flowing out of me. And it was making the audience laugh.”

Director Adam Brace, whose resume includes acclaimed recent shows for Liz Kingsman, Alex Edelman and Leo Reich, had become a friend in the meantime. And he persuaded Target there could be a show in his relationship with the older man.

“Adam was a phenomenal listener with a great eye for detail” Target recalls. “He effectively interviewed me for three months. We selected the most special bits, I went away, performed them and come back to him with transcripts. Then he and I would craft the lines.

“He had phenomenal discipline but liked how free my work was, unfettered by the expectations of the industry. I'm not motivated by money or status. Still, I was in a very cynical place, having lost all my work during the pandemic. Adam reconfirmed my belief in adventurousness and in making work with purpose, to lift people.”

Sadly, Brace also then died suddenly in April, aged 43 after a short illness.

Target is now “not only grieving a friend but also the loss of the show we were making together. I hope we have something that's still rather special.

“It's principally become a tribute to men I loved. Burying Adam, it was so important that we all came together, cried, hugged, laughed and shared stories, accepted that this person is gone in one form. I hope this show creates a space for people to be lovingly held, as we acknowledge the losses we've all just been through and live for what we really care for.”