“ROSEANNE in Leicester?” ponders the night’s toothsome support act, Alan Carr. “Am I the only one who thinks there’s been a mistake?”
There’s been no mistake. From Salt Lake City, via California, comes the woman whose self-titled Nineties sitcom makes her still, arguably, the most famous female comic in the world.
Barr is here as a ringer for the 13th Leicester Comedy Festival, which for the next nine days offers an appealing mix of special events — Monday’s Faith and Comedy debate with Jerry Springer — The Opera co-creator Stewart Lee — and big-name tours by artists such as Ben Elton, The Mighty Boosh, Omid Djalili, Daniel Kitson and Lee Mack.
So what brings her here? Schooners of cash? A strong desire to support the East Midlands comedy scene? Festival organiser Geoff Rowe suggests that the 53-year-old comic is keen to test the waters over here for a stand-up career that she has recently revived in the US.
But while this first ever British show has plenty of good lines, often at the expense of a Republican regime she despises, it’s a stilted affair. She comes on in her housecoat, looking unfussed to be here. Beyond mentioning that she’s not sure how to pronounce the place, she makes little reference to Leicester. And as she burns straight into her opening musings — how quaint, how pre-millennial impeaching a President for lying now seems — a keyboardist plays apposite themes under whatever she’s saying. Slides of George W., of Clinton and Monica, of her ex-husband Tom Arnold support or contrast with her one-liners. And as every comment is so plainly pre-planned, this feels more like a stand-up lecture than stand-up comedy.
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The annoying thing is there are many glimmers of Barr’s huge talent. But she is torn between geopolitical grievances and celebrity confessional.
There are references to childhood in Utah — “I don’t want to say it was backward but every fall we’d set our clocks back a decade” — alongside sub-Chomsky broadsides at the status quo alongside some old-school man-bashing. It’s material that seems quaint now, but is delivered with the easy growl that you long for elsewhere. Barr’s apparently off-the-cuff responses to audience questions shows off the lively, merciless wit for which she’s known. There’s wit and wisdom to her remarks about America’s unequal attitude to drugs; about baby-boomers — or “casket-patch kids” — as she calls her fading peers.
But there’s a fixity of form and a diversity of focus here that makes this feel increasingly like a rant. The lack of local material — “Do you know who Pat Robertson is? No? Goddamit!” — doesn’t help the feeling that this smart but self-contained show would play pretty much the same whether we were there or not.
Tonight: De Montfort Hall, Leicester (0116-233 3111)