Joe Kent-Waters’s second show is exactly what I wanted it to be, which is to say that it’s basically a bigger budget remake of his first show.
In case you missed it, Kent-Waters made a huge impression at last year’s Fringe – winning the Best Newcomer award – with his creation Frankie Monroe, a hulking, gravelly-voiced, white-faced men’s club owner and self-declared ‘biggest bastard in Yorkshire’. The improbable longevity of his anachronistic Rotherham working men’s club was the result of a pact Frankie had signed with the Devil 25 years previously – and in debut show Joe-Kent Waters is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!! the Devil came to collect, the show culminating in him being dragged to Hell, ‘by the balls’.
Joe Kent-Waters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! (Good Fun Time) is the direct sequel: it begins in Hell, where Frankie is essentially practising almost exactly the same schtick to the souls of the damned as he was to the men of Rotherham (who I’m sure are two very different groups of people). The jokes are different, but it’s the same character doing the same shtick in a similar way – an audience member is picked on to a remarkable extent; a puppet dog is deployed.
And it’s brilliant, the best show I’ve seen at the Fringe this year.
Sometimes it’s death to return to what you did last time out, but it was exactly the right decision for Kent-Waters. Most crucially, the joke is still funny. Frankie – a sort of monstrous amalgam of Brian Potter and Papa Lazaru – remains a wonderful character: somewhat cuddly, but with an air of bulky physical menace, and an unfettered weirdness to him that makes even the more ‘normal’ material (a few observational bits about pubs) seem like it was being beamed in from another dimension.
He’s clearly got a bigger budget this time: not crazily so, but there’s a cartoon film that plays out on the big screen at the beginning that brings us up to speed with the events of the last show, plus a fairly chunky nightclub-style lighting rig.
Mostly, though, there’s a palpable sense of increased confidence. That might seem odd to say when it was Kent-Waters’s zealous commitment to maintaining character that defined his first show. But DEAD!!! has a brio and pizzazz that clearly comes from him realising how well the material was received last time, and what he might be able to get away with in future. There’s much less fiddling around with club variety acts than there was before, an understanding that Frankie is funny enough to carry off the entire show on his own. In their stead are several big musical numbers that are just gloriously odd and OTT. The audience interactive stuff has been taken to a whole new level. It starts the same way: he takes somebody’s wallet or phone and they’re given an entirely rigged chance to win it back. But without spoiling, it goes places you’d never imagine.
It’ll be interesting to see what Kent-Waters does with Frankie in the future - the whole Faustian pact story now seems to be played out, and I wonder if he’s really going to want to spend his whole career whiting up every night with what he tells us is Sudocrem. But for now he’s created a pretty much perfect second show. The whole Fringe run is sold out already but keep your ear to the ground for additional performances (which he promised us at the end) and the show will be touring in the autumn, including the obligatory run at Soho Theatre. And failing that: he’ll see you in hell.