There was no kitchen sink at Tim Minchin’s spectacular show last night but it must have been an oversight. There was certainly everything else. Dry ice, grand piano, string quartet, full band and a dancing bear. Oh, and also some tremendously clever comic songs.
Minchin came to the UK from his native Australia in 2005 and this year he has justifiably gone stellar, scaling the stand-up league faster than you can say: "Christmas lunch on the beach." His look has something to do with it. There are touches of Russell Brand in the studded belt, eyeliner and wayward hair but it is his consistently inventive lyrical trickery that really sets comedy pulses racing.
For the first 20 minutes Minchin’s chatty banter was wobbly compared with his music and some technical hitches did not bode well. Misgivings dissolved when he shimmied through the chorus of the realpolitik-tinged If I Didn’t Have You, in which he paid homage to his wife while admitting he would have found someone else if she did not exist.
Other showstoppers included Youtube Lament, in which he bemoaned the fact that cute kittens get more web hits than his virtuoso compositions and Bears Don’t Dig On Dancing, complete with fake bear, in which he protested against ursine cruelty. Both demonstrated the sheer potency of an infectious tune combined with witty wordplay.
Best by far, however, was his epic beat poem Storm, in which he nailed alternative medicine, recalling a dinner party encounter with a homeopathy-hooked hippy when he could not be polite: "Try as I like, a small crack appears in my diplomacy dyke." He was so good I can even forgive his sadism-strewn jaunty tirade in which he wished that violent things would happen to a fellow comedy critic who once gave him a bad review. Well, almost.
Tim Minchin And His Orchestra
Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre
The South Bank Centre,Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX
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