Ellie Taylor is going to be big. In one sense anyway. It doesn't look like she'll be joining the ever diminishing in exclusivity 30 somethings middle-class breeding club and ballooning with the growth of her progeny inside her at any point soon if the evidence of the theme of her hour-long show is anything to go by. However, she is going to have a much increased public profile, and rightly so, because she is a talent who applies her craft deftly.
It is a credit to the North Wall that they continue to attract extremely high profile artists at the top of their game to their beautiful theatre. It is popular with performers and audiences alike and a great venue for comedy with its plush comfortable material and warm enclosed atmosphere created by the raked seating and two layers of balcony faces which provide surround sound guffaws and giggles into the converted swimming pool in the stone building of the old posh school.
Ellie Taylor came to many people's attention with a slot on Live at the Apollo with a set which started with material about getting married. She's since been presenting of a bit of TV pap in the form of Snog, Marry, Avoid and has made up for this by delivering some killer lines from behind the news desk on the excellent Mash Report.
This show,This Guy, takes the next step on from her Live at the Apollo material, centering in on society's assumption of the next step from marriage, that of reproducing one's DNA.
Ellie does the hard work of compering and warming up the room for the support act Simon Fielder. She does a great job of making a few connections in the audience that she'll use throughout the evening and she succeeds in getting some local laughs that apply to the environment she's swiftly adapting to, commenting on the North Wall at St Edwards School - 'Hogwarts has got a lottery grant'. She's endeared and introduced herself to us and created a conducive atmosphere for Simon, tackling a bizarre man who was refusing to stop using his tablet a few seats away from me, without becoming aggressive or indeed violent as I, and others around me felt she probably should have!
Simon also gets a laugh out of the venue, saying that he feels like he's part of a Salem-style witch hunt. He opens with an actual joke, stressed about what to get his Nan for her birthday until he comes up with the idea of getting her a CD - Now 86! He goes down well with the audience, who, one assumes from appearance, are quite well to do, educated, mostly middle-aged people. He gets a good vocal reaction to well-worked material about NutriBullets, gin and tonic, car horns, and being a beta male. It's not my cup of tea, it's a tad on the twee side, but then if it was my cup of tea - a beastly hybrid brew of Jerry Sadowitz, Joan Rivers, and Alexei Sayle - it wouldn't have functioned as well as it did as a support slot for an hour-long show to a more gentle audience than myself. Simon Fielding is obviously very talented and I feel sure that there's lots more to come from him. This set was pitched very well for the occasion. The room is ready.
Ellie returns. A bit more playing the room. When one comes to see an hour-long show from a comedian there's generally a dichotomy between those who've succeeded in creating a Stuart Lee or Daniel Kitson-style thematically linked arced piece which stands alone as a piece of theatre, and those who've come up with a title for the Edinburgh Fringe brochure and winged some material to create an extended set with perhaps a token attempt to crowbar a theme tagged on at the end.
One wonders if something that's more like a show will start. It does, subtly. It starts when Ellie tells of a Christmas present from her mother-in-law: a book about bringing up babies called The Secrets of a Baby Whisperer. Ellie and her husband had revealed no intention to have a baby, they had merely got married, the rest is her mother-in-law's and society's assumption.
'Nothing ruins Christmas more than telling a 70 year old that she has no reason to knit,' Ellie says, and from this point she craftily weaves a personal yarn that points to many an unchecked attitude, all the while keeping her audience laughing along with regular well worked routines, gags, and anecdotes. You could drop into any 10-minute section and it would stand up as a set, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. She shows smooth transitions into accents and characters, the range of which is impressive and she is a cool head at dealing with some bizarre heckles such as 'Trevor is a good name!' which semi-randomly threatened to derail her narrative at one point.
Attention was more than kept for the hour that she examined the subject matter as she expertly used callbacks and dramatic devices to flesh out details and drive the narrative on. I guess one consideration people might have when looking at this show is whether the subject matter has universal appeal. I think it does, or it does at least in Ellie Taylor's hands, which are very, very capable ones.
Definitely check out this show or future offerings from Ellie whilst you can still afford to! It was a pleasure to see her rock my favourite Oxford venue.