John Tothill: Thank God This Lasts Forever review – skint bon vivant risks it all for comedy
There’s breaking the bank to perform at the fringe – then there’s risking your life. In its circuitous way, John Tothill’s new show recounts the drugs trial he recently underwent for ready cash, and how things didn’t go to plan. It did fund this festival run, at least – which, irony of ironies, is now waylaid by ill-health, with Tothill cancelling performances to undergo surgery for a burst appendix. One can imagine his nose wrinkling with distaste at this development. An aesthete and hedonist of the old school, Tothill’s is a life of the mind and the spirit, on which the appendix should properly never seek to impose itself.
Consider it a triumph of that spirit, then, that – performing last weekend with what we now know to have been punctured innards – Tothill delivered another effervescent set to stand alongside last year’s eye-catching debut. His is a voice like no one else’s: foppish, erudite, self-delighted (“I adore to be alive!”) and utterly charming. There is nowhere Tothill would rather be than here, no audience he’d rather be with than us. Must the show end after an hour? Blame Protestantism for that. Tothill wishes it could last the rest of all our lives.
In fact, it zips by, as this lapsed primary school teacher (“the last haven of the polymaths!”) magpies between tales of Thursday night carousing, the Doctor Faustus myth, the burden we place on our signature, of all things, and his flat’s mouse infestation. (“It would be more accurate to say these mice had a John infestation.”) Rodents are a motif: Tothill’s tenuous framework concerns a scientific experiment in which a rat orgasmed itself to death.
Conjuring with the pleasure principle and the Aristotelian good life, Thank God This Lasts Forever is lighter on thesis than 2023’s offering, which mused on England’s lost capacity for transcendence. Perhaps it gains in relatability: Tothill tweaks the dial down on the intellectualism, and the coquettishness, and gives us the irrepressible bon vivant trapped in a skint teacher’s life, driven to desperate measures (a nasty dose of malaria, in short) to keep his spirit, and his bank balance, above the water line. It worked, for which we should be thankful. Let us hope surgery works too, and he’s back onstage soon with this excellent show.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
