Recent graduate Sameera Bowers has put together a helluva show at the precocious age of 22. Here she presents a multimedia extravaganza buzzing with ideas, one that showcases a refreshingly absurdist and fiercely anti-bullshit take on the overlapping worlds of high-achieving academia, corporate orthodoxy, and parental expectations.She’s marketed as a former Cambridge Footlights member, which is offputting, given the organisation’s lingering jolly-hockey-sticks associations with in-group, establishment-maintaining, satire. Bowers is absolutely none of these things, which is a relief.
Instead, Sameera is putting her education to good use, as we don’t need any more economists but we could sure do with a ready supply of oddball clowns – regardless of the demand.
As becomes clear, her mum would probably disagree. Through stand-up – of the discursive, storytelling nature, rather than trad set-up ‘n’ punchline – poetry, and slideshow comedy, Bowers sets her family’s hopes for her career against her own desire to spent six minutes in a tent near Brighton seafront being a spherical cow.
The PowerPoint sections are particular highlights. Economists and geographers argue about where to place a hotel, both – but especially the economist – applying their airtight theoretical frameworks to real world situations, with preposterous results; and snake oil salesmen use mathematical formulae to shoehorn intersectionality into corporate hiring policy. It’s brilliant stuff – as with Bowers’ commentary on applying for a job at a consultancy firm, there’s a beautiful awareness of language being used to hide both meaning and intent. Consulting who, and for why, and to what end? And why wouldn’t they be interested in a 10,000 word dissertation about puddles?
There’s a touch of the young-fogey idiot savant to Bowers’ on-stage persona, with nonsense phrases in the place of swearing, and a delightfully faux-awkward pause, and gaze back to the audience, when transitioning to one character to another.
The whole things doesn’t quite hold together perfectly yet, and some sections need tightening a little. Moderate editing of the generally hilarious self-help guru Crystal is in order; perhaps too a mild pruning could be administered to the madcap puppetry car journey section, which is nonetheless engaging in a Centrist Dad having a meltdown over guitar pedals kind of way. The pyramid scheme absurdity of Bowers’ online education empire should stay exactly as it is; as should the section on her important role as an ambassador for care home living, though the reliance on AI imagery left a sour taste in the mouth.
Overall, though, this is brilliant show. The confidence in the material is there, as is the mastery of waiting for the audience to gradually be drawn into one’s madcap, oddball world. There’s even time for a deconstruction of a bad review, in which Bowers is cringingly congratulated for not being too focused on her own ethnicity. Intermittently, an analogue phone rings, a “ticking clock” devise that brings urgency to the show, as a grandmother’s questions are forever avoided. There’s no doubt, though, in this reviewer’s mind that Bowers has chosen the correct career path. Her weirdo soul wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.
Reviewed on 7th May. Runs to 9th May
