Dreaming is a great place to hide. You can be anywhere, do anything. Personally, I just want to act. Or at least tell a joke that doesn’t immediately crash into sad, middle-aged bad-joke territory.
For a long time, I have had this very specific image stuck in my head. A flight to some nondescript state in the middle of America for a tech conference. Looking out the window, you see the wingtip, some clouds, and an endless expanse of sun-bleached green stretching out like lime jelly left to melt. It felt like the ultimate escape, an eleven-hour cruise where your mind just drifts.
But the reality of that flight is a bit different. You are stuck in a middle seat, pinned between two strangers gradually encroaching on your armrests as the hours drag on. And you are heading to a convention centre packed with reverse-hourglass tech bros, guys with gym-built shoulders tapering into impossibly skinny jeans, all aggressively jostling for attention. Turns out, I wasn’t dreaming any of this up. I was just watching someone else’s reality.
Enter Matt Smith. Not the Doctor Who one, unfortunately, but a clever and genuinely funny comedian I felt an instant connection with. As he stood up in a tiny room in front of just a few of us, the penny dropped. This wasn’t my daydream. This was his actual life. That brutal eleven-hour flight was just another day at the office for him as a tech journalist.
The staging was incredibly simple but totally effective. Just a single lamp sitting on the microphone speaker, casting a glow over the room and making the whole thing feel intimate and confessional. Right at the start, Matt asked an audience member to inspect his Japanese tattoo. It was a great, tactile icebreaker that pulled us straight into his stories about his life, figuring himself out, and his time living in Japan.
Turning left on a plane and looking back at the sea of economy seats might be his mundane normal. But Matt used those stagnant hours in the air to build something else. Standing in front of a single lamp, he shared the exact stories he had written while trapped in transit to the Midwest, turning the sheer boredom of corporate travel into real human connection.
This is why I watch Work in Progress shows at Greater Manchester Fringe. There is a specific kind of rawness to them. You are watching an artist test-drive a set and figure out the shape of it right in front of you. Watching Matt in that room, the real trick was seeing how the mind-numbing grind of a work trip could be taken apart and turned into an enjoyable piece of live comedy in the Quigley Room at The Kings Arms, Salford.
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By
James
For Canal Street Media