Since performing his debut show at the Edinburgh Fringe, Henry Rowley claims he’s tweaked his sketches to make them “weirder”. And although the main take away from Just Literally is the TikTok star’s hyperactive, impressive physicality and puppyish charm, the show does indeed run the gamut from crowd-pleasing accessibility to lyrical oddness with phenomenal verve.
Rowley resembles a boyband member with his youthful good looks, black singlet vest and smattering of tattoos on his arms. Allied to his moneyed upbringing and status as an online phenomenon, he appreciates that, although he can count on plenty of established fans in his predominantly female audience, others are primed to regard him with the scorn that the rich and the showily flash inevitably provoke.
And so he expands a lot of nervous energy on framing and disclaiming his identity. Introducing himself as a “posh English twat”, jumping on any noise or reaction from the crowd with an eager desire to ingratiate, providing frequent meta-commentary on how the show’s going, he thoroughly skewers his affluent background.
Periodically returning to the question “Why am I like this?”, he’s afforded some answer by his aggressively pranking older brothers and phenomenally monikered father, Hungerford, seemingly destined to always be his greatest critic and to damn Rowley with faint praise. An aristocratic patrician of the old school, he’s perhaps over-relied upon for pull-back and reveal gags by his son.
Even more character-establishing however is the reproduction of an interview Rowley gave to society magazine Tatler with which he opens the show, a gushing, even flirtatious profile that is word-for-word reproduced here, as he animatedly tries and fails to inhabit the journalist’s depiction of him as the suave, bright young hope of British comedy. Wresting back some partial ownership of his personal narrative, it’s a canny and compelling bit of business.
After that, it’s his greatest hit, cigarette-husky, oblivious posh girl Minty, who affirms his credentials as a class renegade. Hyper-dramatic, with a penchant for excessive swearing and with exceptional mean girl energy, she’s a familiar archetype. But she’s also one that’s elevated by Rowley’s nuanced expressiveness and his gift for flicking between the most distorted aspects of her personality in a split-second.
Another character that appears later in the show, Nigel, the proud priority boarder, is an even grosser triumph of supremely arrogant ego, a gammon grotesque luxuriating in his own pantomime villain hamminess. With his eyes popping and veins bulging, he’s a sublime calling card for any casting directors out there seeking a posh boy with a near-operatic capacity for scenery chewing.
Rowley is less sure-footed playing a real-life swaggering alpha male, the forever flexing Steven Bartlett. The comic’s previous occupation in tech marketing – one of several brief insights into his real life that garnish the show and which peak with the odd couple relationship he presents of life with his more down-to earth northern girlfriend – affords him a certain amount of licence to mock the smug, self-made Diary Of A CEO podcaster. Yet the sketch’s trump card is actually Bartlett’s interviewee, a US tech bro with all of the life trappings that mega wealth can provide, but an aching, spiritual hole in his softly spoken soul, a preoccupation that Rowley shatters with exquisite timing.
Although the sketches seldom end on a strong punchline, with Rowley often having to explicitly state that they’ve finished, it’s rarely a problem because his performance is everything. An early skit about his priapically named school is an excuse to see how far his charm can carry a succession of knob gags. But it also confirms his ease with a peculiarly British kind of camp and at playing emotive, explosive women.
Closing with his strongest material, from the seemingly straightforward scenarios of dating apps and flight safety videos, Rowley freely indulges whatever interpretative dance training he’s had. His limber jerks and unrestricted capering is amusing in itself, but it’s also the visual baseline as he propels the storylines of both skits into weirder and more offbeat territory.
Elsewhere, the bizarrely Oedipal relationship his friend George has with his mother inspires a kind of Wodehouse-meets-The Addams Family tableaux of the loud, outrageous and borderline incestuous English upper-classes.
But then George’s date with a girl, with his inner monologue and parents’ conflicting advice constantly tripping him up, recalls the best of Peep Show in its multi-layered narrative, with Rowley artfully reacting to his own pre-recorded voice. Utterly endearing too, it ought to prove highly relatable for anyone who’s experienced the terror of a first date.
Telegenic, privileged and abundantly talented, it would be so, so easy to dislike Rowley. Yet his nervy charisma and ravenous hunger to entertain dispel any such negative thoughts.
Runs until 29 November 2024 I Image: Contributed
The Reviews Hub Score
Telegenic, privileged and abundantly talented.
