A tender, hilarious hour that’s part stand-up, part heartfelt memoir—raw, relatable, and irresistibly real.
Ivo Graham’s Carousel does not feel far removed from a tight 1-hour stand up set. Except sadder. Matched, however, by humour! And that’s the best kind of show: you’re engaged the whole way through, you laugh about half of the time, and then you aggressively restrain the tears for a quarter, because why are you crying, you sentimental fool? An excellent balance. And an excellent length for all of us now incapable of sitting still longer than an hour. Of which, I am manifestly one.
In one hour, Graham carouses through his life and memories, largely from the last 12 years, since he graduated Oxford. A self-professed hoarder, Graham has turned pathology into a one-man show. His narrative vehicle is ‘Ten Things I’ll Never Throw Away’. And we travel through time in ten different lenses, from Graham’s favourite photos, to a note from his late grandma scribbled on the back of a Mr Kipling’s packet, to a tiger costume (for his ritual The Tiger who came to Tea re-enactments, naturally). There is no logic to the timeline beyond these items, and we are hurled from 2012 to 2018 back to 2012 and onto 2022. Graham makes a joke about the two thinly differentiated timelines of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, but his own timeline makes Little Women look like a Biff and Chip book by comparison. But that’s okay: the timeline of the narrative isn’t really that important. Because despite the frantic time jumps, you are captivated, and entirely locked in. Which is no mean feat, given that this show is really just Ivo Graham standing in from of an intimate audience, and telling us about his life through what is largely chachka.
The heart of Graham’s show is his young daughter, and weight of his dysfunctional parental set up (he and his daughter’s mother have not been together since she was very young)
Given the monumental task of merely engaging people in something that pertains solely to Graham’s own life, what’s particularly successful – and scary – is just how relatable Graham is. And I don’t have a child to contend with.
Graham is raw, compelling, and unfiltered. Except, of course, he is filtered, because he’s written the show and is following his own script. And yet, unlike many comedians, Graham has succeeded in cultivating that intangible quality that makes him feel honest and ‘real’, not a parody of himself, or an exaggeration of the everyday Graham. He feels like a real person, and that, is a real achievement.
If I had to nitpick, then I would point out that the jumpy timeline along with the pseudonyms donned for his ex-girlfriends did give a sense that the titular ‘carousel’ pertains to a busy Carousel of Women (not of the Louisa May Alcott variety) mwhich I don’t believe is, in fact, the case.
The vibe of a sadder-than-usual standup makes for an unconventional hour of theatre, that doesn’t feel very theatrical – bar his emotionally manipulative, but effective, deployment of music -but it is a wonderfully crafted piece of theatre, and one that will stay with you. Especially because you get given a dinky laminated train ticket memorialising his show: a sweet treat for all his fellow hoarders.