Tom Houghton knows his stories of a posho travelling to South East Asia to salve his existential anguish aren’t likely to engender much sympathy.
Yet he’s undeniably had a bit of a mental wobble since hitting 40. Unsettled by his parents’ waning faculties, painfully single and left high and dry by his friends settling down, he’s lonely. So naturally he sought to find himself at the bottom of the ocean, going scuba diving in what amounted to his second gap year, fully appreciating what a privileged, Western cliché it made him.
The circumstances of how he came to find himself staring into the watery abyss is the basis for a drifting tale about a sad clown floundering as he tries to rediscover his mojo. Challenging his family’s upper-class, martial background, with his father a former head of the UK’s armed forces, the likeably self-aware, ebullient and tiggerishly expressive comic grew up a musicals kid, his many camp, animated act outs a legacy of his barely suppressed West End dreams.
After coming out on the front foot and gently roasting the front rows, he launches straight into the difficult stuff of his impending orphanhood with surprisingly vigorous humour and energy, sharing the covert war that his parents are locked in, with each trying to convince Houghton that the other is going doolally.
Notwithstanding that he’s now in his fifth decade, laments the younger generation’s caution with alcohol and has an eye for a hostel bunk-up while travelling, Houghton comes across as a bit of a little boy lost, indelibly marked by his boarding school education, his progenitors’ influence on him still powerful.
Not that he views his parents through rose-tinted spectacles, even if his affection for them is palpable. His mother is portrayed as insensitively doom-mongering and stoking his fears, while her indomitable nature in the face of physical decline has him foreseeing her life extended as a Futurama-style head in a jar.
Meanwhile, his father is revealed as a lusty imperialist in waiting, ready to roister and roger his fortune away on nubile immigrants the instant he becomes a widower.
For all of his own neglected libido and dejected soul, Houghton is mindful that as a single, white, middle-aged man, lurking around the pleasure spots of Asia isn’t necessarily a great look. And he elicits considerable laughs depicting himself as a grotesque, Phantom of the Opera-like pariah, desperately trying to get someone, anyone, to help him apply his suncream.
His highly strung, performative shtick extends to some gloriously contrived gags that he defends with angry insistence, even if his mockery of modern, platitudinal and vacuous spirituality often feels like an easy target.
Still, Deep bounds along nicely for the most part, though his double ending – a self-debasing memory of him having a bachelor pad in The Tower of London, followed by a showstopping, coda of a callback to his childhood ambitions, both highly amusing in of themselves, feels like over-egging the pudding somewhat when one alone would have sufficed.
Tours until 26 April 2026 | Image: Contributed
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The Reviews Hub Score7
