2008

Where You From?
Lenny Henry
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide,
July 2, 2008

Back in Australia for a fifth time round, UK comic Lenny Henry (CBE) is asking audiences where they’re from. And as he mellows towards his fiftieth birthday next month, he is also telling us where he has been. He makes a droll tale of his family migrating from Jamaica to Dudley in the Midlands. Adding a little power point he shows us the Dudley sights from the canal to Mad O’Rourke’s pie shop and how, as a young talent in the late seventies, he was appearing – “and now the only one of ‘em who doesn’t need make-up” – on a touring version of the Black and White Minstrel Show.

The engagingly ebullient Henry’s show, smartly directed by Mr Bean writer Hamish McColl, is an easy mix of stand-up and his trademark character comedy. All good comics can work a crowd but he is geniality itself. Hello my people, he bellows in a voice like Paul Robeson’s, as he moves towards the willing participants in the front row. And where are they from ? Some of them not far from the Dudley canal. One is from Wolverhampton, another, from Essex, gets the posh treatment. Fresh from a regional tour in the UK he has been keeping it local, so when he turns to Adelaide it is a relief that he prefers the ubiquity of effing wineries to the usual shallow grave preoccupations of interstate comedians.

An admirer of Bill Cosby, Henry too has his signature characters, but he is careful not make them caricatures. The amusingly cranky Willsden shopkeeper, Mr Lister has a cold eye on the supermarket competition, and his wife Rachel, a sardonic view of marriage and the trendy Anglican minister who has replaced the altar with two turntables and a large amp. We later meet the Reverend Carmichael and get to sing in his all-inclusive, all faiths Christian, moslem, hindu feminist choir. It is funny but not too funny. They are lightly carried but Henry has strong views about fomenting division or ridicule and his is not the comedy to do that.

With wickedly accomplished send-ups of everyone from Tom Jones to Prince and Michael Jackson, and a sharp interest in current hip-hop, Henry is the master of funk as well as fun but it is the warmly nuanced vignettes that stay longest in mind. Whether as Mr Lister’s son Daniel on military duty, under-equipped and collaterally challenged in Basra, writing a poem to his wife Debs, with many rhymes for the word rifle, or the old codger in the aged facility wryly commenting on his own twilight zone, Lenny Henry’s expansive comic gift is never more apparent, or distinctively his own.

Murray Bramwell

“A host of characters …” The Australian, July 4, 2008, p.10.