Bespoke: Not the right fit for a Sunday afternoon crowd

The oddest thing about watching Stuart Taylor’s latest one-man comedy show, Bespoke, is knowing that last month, he was on the stage at Sexpo.

I expect he kept his clothes on as he worked the stage, unlike almost everyone else who gets paid to perform there. But even so, mild-mannered Taylor, who talks about his wife and four-year-old kid and their nice house in upper-crust Constantia? Ok, he swears once or twice in his set, but he’s hardly the ribald, below-the-belt comic you’d expect to entertain a crowd high on lust and low on inhibitions.

That’s a side of Taylor I’d quite like to see, to spice up his pleasant convivial comedy in an act that has become a little, well, predictable.

Bespoke is his ninth show, and it builds on his previous shows like Learner Husband and Learner Dad. Now I can’t help wondering if his Sexpo show was called Learner Swinger or something, because the repertoire of Bespoke probably wouldn’t have ignited much passion.

Taylor has always stuck me as an amiable sort of bloke delivering gentle humour rather than bodice-ripping hilarity, and Bespoke definitely follows that trend.

But it’s a little weaker than expected because he’s cut down on the script and relies more on audience participation to spark ideas. It didn’t work tremendously well with a Sunday afternoon audience. First, he guided us by asking who was married or single, who were parents, and whether they had boys or girls. That let him revisit some of the material in his previous shows, and deliver a few good off-the-cuff comments along the way. Once his chatter about the differences between raising girls and boys started to feel a little like an anthropological lecture he wove his way towards that old stalwart subject of racism, trying to encourage the audience to give him feedback on some of the derogatory terms people of different skin tones might have been called. When that didn’t really work he stoically carried on anyway, with patter about being the only coloured parents in Constantia.

There were a few good laughs, some witty improvised chatter and a very conversational style that was more like a chat than a show.

At one stage he launched into a routine about having performed in America, which almost felt like he was trying to prove his credentials to this audience on a lethargic Joburg afternoon.

I don’t think we were a tough crowd – I’m sure the audience at Sexpo must have been harder. DM