Dandelion

Dandelion Mind is a new show by Bill Bailey, at the glorious, refurbished Wyndham’s theatre near Leicester Square.   On the general theme of doubt (or is it?).

Eldest and I went along.

What a good evening. BB - in case you don't know - is a highly talented comedian/musician; he came out, looked at the newly-decorated auditorium with its rich painted ceiling, chandelier and over-the-top pink-white ornamentation and immediately played something that sounded 18th century baroque-y harpsichord-y on his keyboard. “That’s what you need for a place like this, innit?”

This has to count as one of the best nights out I’ve had for many years (school events excluded of course – that wouldn’t be fair). We were in the second row of the stalls (an extravagance, plus we booked early), and the BB was at most 3-4 metres away from us for most of the show. From that angle, he seemed a God - admittedly a God that looked a lot like a bemused troll, but nevertheless…

Bailey seems to shamble on stage and do his stuff in a kind of stream-of-consciousness way, ad-libbing where necessary. And yet I think it's actually quite highly structured – with space for free-form flights of imagination where he needs them. So he begins with a structured rant against the Lib Dems (and Tories of course), which is very funny, before moving on to his despair at the England football team. He does them very well, but somehow I felt that there was little specifically Baileyish about these set pieces.

However, a little later, he reminded us just how superb his ad-libbing can be. Talking to a member of the audience, he said that the instrument he was holding was a lute. To which she apparently said “Ood”. This led to a wild fantasy which is very hard to describe properly – he repeated the word while slowly ageing on stage - imagining the ‘rise and fall of great civilisations outside the theatre – giant, scarlet crabs eventually taking over and superseding the human race’ while inside all was locked into ‘Ood. It’s an Oood. Ooood….’

This is an evening which ranges across a terrific range of subjects (and musical styles of course). At one point he explained why a spokesman for the Large Hadron Collider had said that there would be ‘inverse femtobarns’ of results. Ending – ‘it’s a kind of physicists joke, you see’. Which of course it is. (Look up the barn on Wikipedia – the physical unit – then the prefix femto – then consider the inverse. The spokesman meant there would be huge, uncountably many results). 

BB made this funny. A little later he gives us a speedy art-historical chat (with slides) on the history of the story of Doubting Thomas in renaissance paintings - also funny.  Marvellous.

Of course that approach means that some of the references he gives as asides don't work - he may have seen '2012' but it seemed few of his audience on Friday had...

A little later he moved back to science:

BB: Nuclear Fission, who knows how that works then? Come on, anyone?
(Nudged by eldest, I reluctantly raised a hand. Second row of the stalls, so I get spotted).
BB: Oh great. So you know about this stuff do you?
Me: Yes. (reluctantly)
BB: So I’ve always wondered. Is it like a kettle?
Me: Yes
BB: Great. So now I know. Nuclear fission’s like a kettle.
(Pause)
BB:Is it really like a kettle?
Me: No.
BB: So how’s it work then?
Me: Bits of stuff, bash together, bit of stuff left over comes out as energy, there you go.
BB: Great. Did you all hear that? Stuff comes together. Bish-bash-bosh (London accent - do I sound like that?) - Energy. So now we know.

I think he looked slightly disappointed. As though he wanted a proper description (and of course I’d confused fission and fusion in my ‘explanation’). Sigh.

And I do think he wants to know and talk about stuff properly. A little later, he was explaining how – in response to a London cabbie’s ‘Be Lucky!’ - he’d gone off on an existential rant on the meaning of luck and the pointlessness of the exhortation. Including a cross-reference to the feeling of being 'fated' as felt by Chaucer’s Palamon and Arcite in The Knight’s Tale. Nice.

I’d better shut up – although it is tempting to recite as much of the show as I can remember, that’d hardly be fair. Instead I’ll just end by exhorting all and sundry to go and see it for themselves. And stay for all of the encores…