Rob Auton: The Eyes Open and Shut Show review – eccentric observation and wonderment
A career that might be more successful if only he could describe to people what he’s actually doing. That’s how Rob Auton describes his life’s work – half- (or less) jokingly – in his new hour The Eyes Open and Shut Show. So what is he doing? At points tonight, the Yorkshireman self-identifies as a comedian, and as a poet. You might throw in philosopher too, or indeed aphorist – with reference to the pithy principles Auton hews from his inquiry into life and how to live it, and which, fashioned into homespun artworks, he touts as merch at the end of the show.
If that sounds like a commercial instinct at play – well, I think the 42-year-old can be forgiven a rearguard effort to make his eccentric brand of performance pay. Tonight’s set takes as its soft focus the subject of eyes. What’s the difference between whale-watching and whale-seeing? If we sneezed with our eyes open, would they pop out of our head? And “can you imagine if you loved blinking?” Auton worries away at these half-banal, half-profound inquiries, sends up his own kooky interest in them, and gets meta on the jokes he constructs thereof. The upshot is a meandering monologue piloted by Auton’s curiosity about graveyards, the teachings of Eckhart Tolle, or the key to Mick Jagger’s success.
It may be stronger on sideways observation and wonderment (“I’m always trying to bring my life to life”), but it’s not without laughs: I relished his account of how acquiring a telescope gave him the confidence to talk to bus drivers. And there are satisfying callbacks and circularities that give Auton’s ruminations a semblance of structure. At points, you might find the material too (faux?) naive for its own good, or that Auton’s sentimentality isn’t quite sufficient as a substitute for big laughs. But the show reeled me in, with the freshness of our host’s way of seeing and being. Then won me over in its heartfelt final moments, which comprise a hymn to the preciousness of life, for all that it’s never quite as good as you want it to be.
• Rob Auton is at the Glee Club, Birmingham, on Wednesday, then touring.
