David Trent @ Just the Tonic, The Mash House
Internet killed the comedy star…
A modern Divine Comedy might well take the form of a tour of the undernet. And David Trent might, at first, seem like the ideal candidate to play Virgil to show us the gruesome sights.
Big, bearded and angry, Trent has clearly spent more time than he should clicking his way into the darkest spirals of our virtual inferno. His show starts promisingly as he shares absurd adverts for intelligent cutlery and nightmarish CGI nursery rhymes. His extended rants on the inanity of this frothing futurism are good fun – his excitement peaking when he turns a viral tweet about gay wedding cakes into a hoarse-throated heavy metal riff. But it’s not long before the notion that he’s navigating the very maddest frontiers for us falls away and the show starts to feel a bit purgatorial instead – like being stuck with a bloke from IT who insists on sharing all the clips he’s favourited lately.
This could have worked perhaps if it was done with a good level of insight (the way Clive James used to pull apart TV oddities in the late 80s). But the analysis which accompanies this show-and-tell lapses into the ordinary far too soon. Telling us that Katie Hopkins is an über-troll is a long way from cutting edge.
The show really starts to unravel when Trent checks his watch and realises he’s spunked too much of his hour showing repetitive clips in full (“make it stop” was one person’s comment several unnecessary minutes into one). He then proceeds to whizz through thirty minutes worth of material in three, showing us random excerpts of what we could have enjoyed had he been more organised.
At first, it seems like this ramped-up finale might be a deliberate part of the show, a way to express the madness induced by an overdose of modern media, but if so, Trent never says so and the rush is undercut by the long (albeit quite amusing) pause in the middle when he gives us his bucket speech. A guitar in a spotlight stays untouched throughout, and why he's wearing a dress under his clothes remains similarly unclear. Whatever the intention, in the end this is simply a clip show – but surely, the reason most of us come to the Fringe is to get away from the all-consuming tyranny of our computer screens.