“I’m David Elms, and I’m going to describe a room”, the soft-spoken, unassuming writer and comedian tells us at the outset of what is essentially a highly skilled, one-hour extended party piece. The show does what it says on the tin: with the audience’s assistance, we get a different imaginary room described each performance, and we see Elms interact with its contents in a virtuosic narrative display of mime and physical comedy. It is a deceptively simple idea, brilliantly executed, and a feat of collective memory testing to boot.
The first two-thirds of the show involve constructing the room. Suggestions from the audience as to its form and fillings invite deft comedic backchat from Elms and gentle probing for further details. “There is a cheese grater on a shelf”, says one audience member. “What shape and kind?” says Elms. “Conical. Philippe Starck, it doesn’t work very well,” comes the reply. Later, someone suggests there is a calculator hanging by a string from the ceiling. “What brand?” says Elms. “A Casio”, comes the reply. “Ah, Casio, very much the Phillipe Starck of the calculator world”, says Elms. It is clever stuff that relies on spectators willing to lean in and engage.
Once we get the idea, there is no stopping us. 40 minutes in, we have the entire room and its contents described, as well as the contents of two adjacent rooms and the view out the window (an old English graveyard in a field of yellow, with overhanging Cyprus trees and roaming goats). The final third of the show involves Elms creating a novel, mostly wordless comic narrative that connects the people, furniture, machines, and ephemera we have collectively conjured up. The challenge is that both Elms and the audience have to collectively recall who is there, where everything is, what everything does, what sound it makes, and, in the case of the grapes hanging from the ceiling and the tangerine on the shelf, whether they are ripe and ready to eat.
Of course, narratively this adds up to a great big shaggy-dog story with no sensible plot or outcome, but the joy here comes in the journey, not in reaching the destination. So laid-back and engaging is Elms as a host that his injunction that we “give ourselves the night off from being funny” feels like permission to engage fully in a cathartic endeavour of collective imagination. “How do we feel” about the goats on the framed cover of Elle magazine on the wall behind the white plastic garden chair? Pretty good, it turns out. One can say the same thing about the show as a whole. A subtle, understated 60 minutes of unassuming pleasure.
Runs until 24 May 2026
