Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2018: Dylan Moran's 'Dr Cosmos' is a manual for life in 2018
Dylan Moran hasn’t so much stopped drinking as taken a holiday from it; he knows he may well start again, but the time felt right for a healthy leave of absence.
He is, after all, a forty-six-year-old man who can vividly describe the way his body is collapsing into ruin, even as his muscle memory seems to have forgotten the very concept of flirtatious body language. “You’re not sex person…” he apparently dawned when a recent move was made on him. “Sex person is at home. Don’t try to fool me!”
Playing a wreck of a man before his time is a trick which – we mean no offense here – sits well with the Black Books creator, given that his stock-in-trade is as a kind of Renaissance curmudgeon.
In this shortened preview version of his upcoming national tour, he plays both sides, grumbling about Millennials who follow their dreams and then have to move back in with their parents when those dreams don’t work out; although his heavily stoked ire – “of course I think you’re a failure!” – is somewhat in character, and disguises the fact that he’s empathising with a younger generation who have to put up with old grouches like him.
He stumbles into material on Trump and the state of the world almost as though he’s trying to avoid it but can’t help himself (he knows exactly what he’s doing, of course), and it’s when Moran embraces wider topics that the brilliance of his supposedly off-the-cuff bewilderment really hits home.
Punch-drunk, pissed-off and sick of it all, but determined to at least wring as much black humour out of proceedings as he can, Dr. Cosmos has written a manual for life in 2018.
Assembly Hall, until Saturday 25th August; Gilded Balloon Rose Theatre, until Sunday 26th August. Tickets here.
