Kevin Shepherd: Thus Spoke Kev @ Captain Taylor's Coffee House

The work of notoriously opaque German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche might not sound like a laugh but don’t worry, knowledge of his work isn’t required (though there are a few bonus jokes for the initiated). Kevin Shepherd’s stage presence is relaxed enough to wield such lofty ideas without making them seem inaccessible, even with tonight’s reluctant crowd. For the most part he relates these nuggets of Nietzschean wisdom, mainly regarding love troubles, to his own experiences as he describes very honestly the circumstances of his 11 year ‘joke marriage’ and how he found the strength to end it.

It’s actually more a show about his struggle with the concept of relationships, and what can make a happy one, without any of the hackneyed domestic material you might expect from that. The show builds to a brilliantly whimsical tale about Kev dining with Nietzsche in a chain restaurant and it really demonstrates his eye for a well crafted turn of phrase, colouring it with nimble vocabulary. By his own admission this is a bit of an experiment for Shepherd, and it’s probably not quite as funny as it could be. There is a brilliantly observed, quite touching and potentially hilarious show in here somewhere though, he just hasn’t quite managed to find all of it.