Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible is Going to Happen review – hilarity and heartbreak
The cliche of the sad clown – the jester who uses laughs to paper over the cracks in their deeply flawed personality – is ubiquitous probably because it’s largely true. Ask most standup comedians, and they’ll likely agree that underneath the wit lies a lot of pain and heartbreak. Certainly this is the starting point of Marcelo Dos Santos’s tightly conceived one-person show, Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen. It establishes a mood of tottering anxiety from the outset, and only darkens and complicates it therein.
One of the first hurdles is the fact that Dos Santos isn’t the performer of his (seemingly autobiographical) standup routine. The person playing the role of the unnamed comedian is UK actor Samuel Barnett, who launches into a monologue about dating an American man suffering from cataplexy, a condition whereby laughter causes extreme muscle paroxysm. So we have the comedian and the boyfriend who can’t laugh.
Related: Samuel Barnett: the 10 funniest things I have ever seen (on the internet)
It’s a nifty conceit, and Dos Santos mines a rich vein of ambivalence and insecurity without losing sight of the natural absurdity of the pairing. Barnett’s comedian is nervy and self-sabotaging, racked with doubt and a seemingly endless parade of pathologies; his new American boyfriend is chiseled, sanguine and perfectly sane. It can’t possibly work.
For much of Feeling Afraid’s running time, the conventions and expectations of standup are neatly met; audiences could easily convince themselves they’d wandered into a comedy festival show. But while Barnett absolutely nails the beats and pacing of standup, delivering plenty of throwaway gags and smart punchlines, his skill as an actor allows for a nuance and depth of character you rarely find on the circuit. His pauses and casual asides hint not just at despondency but outright despair.
The majority of this darkness comes from the subterranean grime of gay dating apps and chemically induced casual sex, anathema in the comedian’s eyes to the ideals of true love and hope for a “real relationship” that the American represents. But Dos Santos is no moralist or puritan, he lets us see the illusion of perfection for what it is: a ruse or impossible dream. Those acts of self-sabotage – including a cringeworthy aborted threesome and an awful lot of coke – are foolish but they’re also clearly a step towards forgiveness and self-acceptance.
One of the key modalities Dos Santos embraces – and Barnett brilliantly exploits – is a knowing ambiguity; the more Barnett confides about his relationship, the murkier the show becomes. As biographical details accrue, a distinct sense of unreliability emerges. We all know the standup comic finesses and exaggerates in the service of laughter but here the manipulation of facts seems to be making a larger point.
Feeling Afraid is as much a meditation on authenticity and the role of the confessional in public discourse as it is a game of cat and mouse with the audience. Whose story is the comedian actually telling here? The standup is constantly throwing out the aside “true story, true story”, but it’s possible none of it is real. And if that’s the case, how complicit are we in the deception? And how much does it really matter that it be true? These questions remain unanswered, lingering in the charged post-show air.
Related: Baby Reindeer review – Richard Gadd’s solo theatre debut is a haunting hour
While it has some similarities with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer (and is produced by the same team as both of those shows), Feeling Afraid actually has more in common with The Worst of Scottee, a stunningly complex faux-confessional monologue performed in a photo booth by UK actor and activist Scottee. That show also played loosely with the audience’s credulity, with the concepts of divulgence and duplicity in the performing arts. Feeling Afraid isn’t quite as accomplished or provocative as that but it does let some genuine existential terror creep into the laughter. It’s a sad kind of funny, or maybe a funny kind of sad.
Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible is Going to Happen is on at Arts Centre Melbourne until 1 February, then Sydney Opera House 5-23 February, then Adelaide Festival Centre 26 February-2 March as part of Adelaide festival
