You know this is a unique gig when a member of the audience can elicit a round of applause by just entering the auditorium and taking their front row seat! Welcome to the annual Huddersfield Jason Byrne appreciation society reunion. Your reviewer has had the privilege of witnessing this phenomenon for the last decade and will be booking his tickets for 2026 as soon as they are available. It is good to catch up with Byrne and his friends every Autumn.
Those in the know, know. Those that don’t (and there are usually very few newbies) have a lot of catching up to do. It is like a school register. The same faces sit in the same seats, gathered together another year older: Greg, the coach driver, brings literally a coach load and occupies almost the entire front row; the affectionately endeared ‘bitches’ don their beanies and baggy pants; Jude the bricklayer’s voice has deepened now he has turned seventeen and the couple in the balcony have once again brought a cardboard cutout of their son who has long since flown the nest. Greg is promoted to operations manager, his friend quit Sainsbury’s, Jude is no longer an apprentice and cardboard cut-out boy now lives in Glasgow and is twenty-five. The first half of Byrne’s Huddersfield dates are more a village hall catch-up rather than a gig. One must wonder if his other dates have this strange feeling or if it is unique to the Lawrence Batley Theatre!
Jason Byrne is a master of improvisation and crowd work. He turns the banal into bonkers and the humdrum into hilarity and has the ability to make the room feel like it is them that are the odd ones. The blur between crowd work and material is so fine it is almost impossible to spot so seamless is Byrne as a comic. He treats us to a couple of his stories from his traditional Catholic father’s wake in Ireland, post-divorce life and parenting an eighteen-year-old boy who has outgrown him in many ways. Material it may be but peppered in-between audience interaction and banter. Where one finishes and the other begins is pure genius. It was well summed up by an audience member on the way out of the theatre who simply stated, “I think he has a show in there somewhere; it’s just I’ve never seen it.”
No Jason Byrne show is complete without his usual surreal humiliation of (usually) the male members of the audience who are dragged onstage and usually forced to wear something ridiculous. This year was the turn of the police officer who wasn’t a police officer in a blue teenager’s anxiety suit playing the Fruit and Veg game with Greg the former coach driver and his friend. One would like to say that it would have made sense if you were in the room but it really didn’t! The same cast returns for the finale as Byrne creates a genius home-made version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody that is too good to spoil. As ever, new recruits to his returning congregation were illuminated – literally with his torch. This time we learned about Gareth who builds lightweight four-seater wingless aeroplanes in his garage, the (apparently famous) park-running identical twins and Colin Firth (not the actor) who, inexplicably, was sitting directly across the auditorium from his wife.
This reviewer will look forward to the roll call next year…
Reviewed on 1st November 2025
