This simply staged one-man show makes for an easy, funny and extraordinarily entertaining night out, even though its subject is the writer/performer's difficult (and possibly unresolved) relationship with his father.
Well-known British comedian and political activist Mark Thomas walks onstage before the house lights are down, and immediately strikes up
a rapport with the audience, like we're all old mates.
His builder father, he tells us in working-class London accents, looked like "Moses with a hangover" and swore like "Cleo Laine with Tourettes". (His son has picked up one or two choice phrases himself, and uses them freely during the evening.)
Surprisingly, however, Thomas Senior liked opera; his son calls it "pantomime for posh people". Meanwhile, Thomas Junior got into alternative comedy: "We would attack the bigots, and there's no bigger bigot than my Dad."
The quips keep coming - "My family is like a Mike Leigh film" - and there's not a boring sentence in the entire show. Like Miranda Harcourt in Biography of My Skin, Thomas has conversations with recordings of his family members - and these interviews suggest that his gift of the gab comes from his mother, who clearly also knows how to deliver lots of meaning in only a few words.
