The elephant in the room is addressed head-on as soon as Nick Mohammed arrives on stage. “Be honest,” he asks, “who’s here because of Ted Lasso?”
Mohammed has achieved worldwide recognition because of his Emmy-nominated acting turn as kit boy-turned-manager Nate, but this evening is a celebration of his stage persona of Mr Swallow – “Less Apple TV+, more apple crumble”, he admits in his distinctively high-pitched, nasal tones.
Mr Swallow appears only after a solid warm-up performance from Ivo Graham, who could quite happily headline here but is content to serve up a series of amuses bouches with anecdotes about the New Year’s party which he turned into a recreation of BBC reality game show The Traitors, the lengths he is prepared to go to get half-price sushi from Itsu, or the appeal of the Top Trumps card game.
When Mohammed does appear, it is on roller skates – for no other reason than it remains a continual source of humour, not least because the Duke of York’s stage has a rake that poses its own perils for someone who has wheels attached to their feet. But this is a small part of the comedy, most of which comes from Mr Swallow’s quick-fire slideshows and numerous diversions off the subject.
As the name of the show suggests, this evening is a collection of previously performed pieces, several of which Mohammed used in character for Mr Swallow’s appearances on the comedy panel show 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. Indeed, the first half of his show revolves around the construction of a Countdown-like numbers round, which devolves into farce. Along the way, Swallow takes several diversions, including the number 24601 driving him to deliver a long, hilarious takedown of the musical Les Misérables.
Some of the diversions reveal the compilation nature of the evening’s performance – why else would we see both The Twelve Days of Christmas and Ding, Dong Merrily on High lampooned in a touring show that runs from March to May – but there is a flow, and joy, to Mohammed’s route through his material that it matters little.
The second half of Mr Swallow’s hour on stage is devoted to memory techniques, with the character claiming to teach us a technique to memorise a list of items. Again, this is the base for silliness and the occasional flight of fancy, but it leads up to a memory-based card trick that enables Mohammed to demonstrate that he is far more wily than Mr Swallow.
As the evening comes to a close, Mohammed returns to the Countdown board for the evening’s coup de grace, a revelation of something that is hiding in plain sight (and, one surmises, will be slightly different on each date of this tour). It’s a brilliant rug-pull, demonstrating the comedian’s air of chaos to be carefully, craftily cultivated.
Reviewed on 26 March and continues to tour until 21 May
