8.30pm @ Trades Hall
Reviewed by Mark Tregonning, Sunday 30 March 2008
Sometimes the key to a good comedy festival experience is to do something different, to know what it is you're doing and to do it well. Deborah Francis-White has found her niche: style that leans towards the educational. She uses a PowerPoint presentation, props and role-playing to teach us what she as learnt about the "right" way for men to pick up women, and for women to want to be picked up.
Deborah chooses a certain number of 'volunteers' from the audience to play key roles in her show. I should confess at the outset that on the night I attended, one of these, not entirely by choice, ended up being me. Perhaps the fact that I was told in no certain terms that I was not as close to James Bond as I had thought (admittedly by the entire female audience, not just Deborah) has made me a little more skeptical of her techniques. One thing I can say, however, is that she presents an old fashioned view of relations between the sexes – on where men do the work, and women sit back and wait.
The show is very slick and has obviously been performed for a while. Deborah works the audience with confidence and makes everyone feel included. All in all the experience is enjoyably different from the standard stand up fare.
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