Russell Brand: Brandemic, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, review: the comic seer's mumbo-jumbo works like a charm
Absence, reputedly, makes the heart grow fonder. And I’ll admit it: after months of getting almost no live comedic satisfaction (I’m still trying to erase memories of Dom Joly battling the elements at a Brent Cross drive-in gig), to see Russell Brand holding court in the leafy heart of Regent’s Park, at the second of two balmy Monday evening performances, was the stuff of parched desert-wanderers encountering oases.
I was never a non-believer, or sudden denier, when it came to Brand’s talent. When he erupted onto the scene in the 2000s, he was an unmistakable breath of fresh air. Here was the antithesis of the tired, suited bloke at a mic; in its place, a Byronic hipster of libidinous excess and Essex-accented verbal extravagance, whose sex and drug addictions were rocket-fuel for his mirth – and his rock’n’roll ascent to celebrity.
Opprobrium was heaped on him during the “Sachsgate” prank-call scandal of 2008 (it has its own Wikipedia page), which saw him quit his Radio 2 job and Jonathan Ross, his partner in insensitivity, fall from grace at the Beeb. But that almost dented him less than his subsequent self-styling as a spiritual leader meets proletarian agitator. On a bad day, his grandiloquent spurning of materialism sounded like a post-hoc rationalisation for a downwardly spiralling film career. On a very bad day, his messianic shtick resulted in the toe-curling bathos of his 2015 election YouTube interview with Ed Miliband, which made both jester and would-be PM risible.
The pandemic, though, has swung the pendulum back Brand’s favour (weirdly, Miliband’s too). Firstly, watching someone with the gift of the gab make light of things is just what the doctor ordered. And the 45-year-old’s tendency to think aloud in abstract, existential terms suits the 2020 mood. Silliness spliced with the sublime? We’re back on-Brand.
Barefoot in the park after kicking off his espadrilles, the comic (bearded, longish-haired, in humble jeans and white shirt) takes in the scene much like a commune leader surveying new recruits, with slow theatrical appreciation: “Thank you for leaving your house, and all of that.”
The applause isn’t as wild as in yesteryear, not least on account of social distancing. “Is the gig half empty or half full?” he muses. “Well no, it’s actually two thirds empty!” Discoursing on his resulting depleted “egoic energy”, he looks out at rows “devoid of all humanity”, before taking comfort from the unseen assembly outside the auditorium, watching on a screen. “There is a Narnia lawn, a second world – how is it going, our dislocated shadow self?”
Tongue in cheek about his own self-aggrandising stance of seer-like wisdom (“The show that’s on is Jesus Christ Superstar – coincidence? I don’t think so”), he sums up the year so far with brutal accuracy: “Lockdown has become a magnifying lens of a lot of our mental illness” – a leery grin: “A lot of you have become more mad.”
There follows a month by month itemisation of the Covidiocy so far: panic-buying (“We let ourselves down there, didn’t we?”), buzz-words like “Furloughing” (“That’s something to do with agriculture or your brow, I refuse to learn it”), the Cummings driving debacle and the mass succumbing to online gambling, porn addiction and alcoholism.
Cue – mercifully – not a detailed unpacking of Brand’s peccadilloes (he’s married with two kids now) but a light-hearted survey (based on filled-in questionnaires) of audience behaviour over the past six months, while he sits in a cross-legged yogic position centre-stage. There are some glorious ad-libs (he riffs a Lionel Bart-style cockney musical interlude just on the back of one geezer’s name) before, amid the gathering darkness, proffering transcendentally inclined self-help thoughts, with a scattering of scatological quips.
I’d have scoffed at his mumbo-jumbo a few years ago, and recoiled at his juvenility. But here, it worked like a charm. Brand was reluctant to leave at the end, staying on stage as if putting off the need to return to the new normal. Who can blame him?
