Ultra-nerdy standup Kieran Hodgson – a man who once did an entire hour about the 1975 European referendum – recently had a cameo role in notorious superhero flop The Flash. In fact he spoke the first line in the movie. This is so prodigiously improbable that it’s no wonder it’s the jumping off point for his new show, Voice of America.
In fact the very English Hodgson makes relatively little hay out of his turn as the character dubbed Sandwich Guy, the drawling American barista who opens the doomed Ezra Miller flicks. Of course he talks about it a lot, and is as bemused as anyone that it happened. But there’s no behind-the-scenes goss or analysis of the film itself. Rather, some initial feedback over the quality of his accent is used as a jumping off point to explore his relationship with America as a whole.
To a certain extent the point of Hodgson’s unswervingly high concept stand-up shows is that they’re not especially relatable: he’s an intensely warm and likeable performer, but he pursues odd obsessions, in an eccentric manner. His last, Made in Scotland, followed his relocation to Glasgow and his attempt to immerse himself in Scottish culture and language to such a ludicrous degree that it seemed calculated to wind up anyone Scottish in the audience (which is quite a lot of people at the Edinburgh Fringe).
Voice of America, though, is very relatable: it’s about the complicated relationship we all have with the US, a country that we tend to be drawn to in our youths then be increasingly ambivalent about as we get older. Standing in front of a giant US flag that vaguely resembles the cover to Springsteen’s Born in the USA album – Hodgson strides on to the title track – the show is delivered with his trademark obsessive focus on the subject at hand. But it’s also a largely gentle affair that sees Hodgson dwell on the various American voices that have impacted on his life, from Presidents, to some random Manhattan intellectuals who befriended him one night at the Met, to ‘the world’s most bisexual woman’.
Hodgson is a pleasure to spend time with: clever but cuddly, he’d probably get on well with your parents but there’s a questing edge to his intellect that keeps things sharp and away from the middle of the road. There is, nonetheless, a sense that the show needs a little more bite, that it’s a bit too affable. But then, finally, he delivers a superb coup de grace: after spending most of the show making light of the fact that he doesn’t want to do a Trump impression, a virtually performance art-like final section sees the unmistakable voice of Trump enter the show like poison. It’s not really about the fact that Trump is A Bad Guy – though that’s kind of a given – but about how ubiquitous he is, a version of America that forcibly enters all our lives, a voice we can’t help but feel familiar with.
It’s a bleak and weird end to the show and it’s hard to really explain why it works but it does: not because it pontificates over how bad Trump is but because it finally slams on the brakes and pivots from fond anecdotes to acknowledging the fact that, however hard we might want to, we can never escape America.