Five words, one clicker and the promise that mastery is only ever a slide away.
Birkby strides on in full 90s guru dressed in a blazer and equipped with a remote cocked like a weapon, fully ready to teach the room how to dominate its destiny, or at least asking the audience, do we ever have control? It’s a swerve from her more confessional past, this time built around a seminar and PowerPoint slides she claims to have assembled on her work laptop complete with the visual of a corporate away-day.
Her skill has always been the slow-burn callback loop by dropping a joke or a throwaway reference early and bringing it back twice as sharp once you may have thought of it as a throwaway one-liner. This remains intact here, format change or not, and it’s at its best in the moments the guru mask slips and you catch the real Chelsea underneath. That’s when the lore drops happen too, her parents wander into the narrative almost accidentally, tangled up in some tangential story about control that started as a joke about Tony Robbins and ended up somewhere much more personal. The connections she draws are gloriously arbitrary until they’re not. The audience warms to her instantly too as she barely needs a minute to get everyone onside, which is really all you need to know about her stage presence.
The PowerPoint gimmick earns its keep through repetition. Every time Birkby is “mugged,” an old-school airhorn sound blares, the one that lives in meme culture at this point, which lands harder for a room that skewed millennial. There’s also a bit built around an audience breakdown, stats and search terms pulled from wherever her online following actually lives, aimed to question, what is she in control of, really, if a slide can tell you what strangers type into a search bar before they’ve even met her.
Where the hour asks a touch more of your patience is the size of the question itself. Control is a vast topic, and it’s a different beast from her past work as the PowerPoint format alone shifts the shape of the hour. Part of the appeal of her work has been that philosophy-meets-pop-psychology cocktail, dissecting a cultural moment with rigour underneath the silliness, and her shows tend to read like essays from the era of her life she’s currently in. This one just felt like an era I personally had to work a little harder to locate myself in, which may be of a subjective thing on my part rather than any reflection on the show itself. Either way, whether she actually finds control by the end, or was gently conning us both from the start, hardly matters – the journey there is still worth taking.
Birkby’s willingness to let the guru crack under his own bravado keeps the overall performance warm. This is a comedian trying on a new suit. Even slightly unhemmed, it still fits better than most.
Chelsea Birkby Is In Full Control The Entire Time ran as a one-off at Beer Tap Merchants, London on Thursday 29th July, and will be running at The Pleasance, Edinburgh during Fringe 5-30th August, tickets here.