Mike Wozniak: The Bench – Citizens Theatre, Glasgow

Blending Mike Wozniak’s favoured shaggy dog storytelling with reactive, improv elements makes The Bench a waggish, entertainingly distinctive show from the outwardly buttoned up comic. And yet it’s oddly familiar.

Listeners to his former St Elwick’s Neighbourhood Association Newsletter podcast will recognise the painfully narrow, parochial focus and the gossipy currency of him knowing the private business of every local character he’s invented, with relatively mundane matters of civic interest blown up into scandals that have set the townsfolk’s tongues a-racing.

Apparently, in Wozniak’s otherwise sleepy corner of Devon, there’s been a mysterious, overnight razing to the ground of a memorial bench. Followed by the equally mysterious erection of a new bench, dedicated to its predecessor.

Out of this confounding vandalism, the comic has contrived a whodunnit where he contemplates all of the eccentrics in his community who had motive and opportunity to commit the heinous deed. Hopping from foot to foot, moustache quivering, the fusty yet animated comic offers an absurdly rambling account of recent goings on. His amateur sleuthing is somewhat less than methodical, but forensic in its awareness of every tiny bit of trivia, hearsay and the dirty laundry of his neighbours and acquaintances.

In this latest incarnation of his stand-up, Wozniak never met a tangent or diversion he didn’t take a shine to. And although the show is initially bewildering in its scene setting, as you struggle to place the blur of protagonists in their related contexts, even as he blithely takes these as established, the windiness of the journey and Wozniak’s densely layered account blossoms into an inherent delight, playing silly games with the art of storytelling itself.

Eliding the distinction between stuff of real import such as armed robberies, affairs and embezzlement with apparently quotidian details like reflections on radiator maintenance, which yet carries a grim cautionary message too, there’s plenty of quirky, flummoxing details to chew over, such as why was a human turd left at the crime scene?

Wozniak reveals an impressive memory to be in total mastery of his non-linear script, the twists and turns in the narrative presented as if occurring to him in the moment. But it’s only in the second half that the show really takes off.

Post-interval, he begins soliciting theories, suspicions and follow-up questions from the crowd, aligning them to his excitement about a case that the police simply couldn’t care less about, dragging The Bench where these contributions dictate.

Despite the plot being so jumbled, the Choose Your Own Adventure aspect really propels the show to its denouement. And Wozniak’s game combination of pre-planned responses and ad-libbing is a joy to witness.

His still-thriving podcast, the cult Three Bean Salad gets an acknowledgement (and a little jig) as he reflects on the inability of middle-aged men to sustain emotional ties with each other. And fans of that pod will doubtless appreciate how he latches onto audience suggestions and runs with them. Even if some of these betray that some in the crowd haven’t been listening to the tale as ardently as he might have liked, his harrumphing frustration is (largely) impeccably politely transmitted.

One doesn’t want to spoil the various characters and sub-plots that Wozniak has woven through The Bench too much, not least as they should vary slightly at each performance if the audience is properly engaged.

Suffice to say though, the involvement of a paramilitary appreciation society was something I didn’t see coming. And in the matinee show I attended, the unmasking of the culprit was hilariously anti-climatic, virtually an afterthought, emphasising that the roundabout means of getting there was the true point.