Greg Davies, Queen Elizabeth Hall - comedy review

Davies's show, The Back of My Mum’s Head, focuses on his inability to be a proper adult
17 December 2013

Greg Davies starts as he means to go on by patting his stomach and describing the time a producer called his lumpy torso a "bin bag full of coleslaw". But there is more to Davies than belly laughs. There are fart gags, toilet incidents and infantile antics. His recent madcap C4 sitcom Man Down suddenly feels more like a documentary.

His show’s title, The Back of My Mum’s Head, comes from the fact that as a child Davies’s exasperated mother would regularly stomp out of the room. His abiding image of her is now replayed for full comic effect, with large rear-view pictures of her head behind him onstage as he rampages through his inability to be a proper adult.

The extremely likeable ex-teacher still knows how to hold people’s attention. Though now he is doing it with lessons in puerility, recalling how he bullied his sister with a game called Swingball Stingball, or recently argued with a cabbie at unreasonable length about the definition of "cake".

There may actually be a serious subtext here. Davies is not the first person to suggest that everyone is a little bit mad. Who, asks our hero, has never considered steering their car into oncoming traffic? All very entertaining, but if he ever offers me a lift I think I’ll take the bus.

Until Fri Dec 20 (0844 847 9910, southbankcentre.co.uk)

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