Review-The Imposter-Story Worthy Week
15-9-14
By: Tom Hope
We all have at least one story to tell. Our own.
That’s the founding premise of HK Stories, established by Tom Tiding and David Young as a community project, so Hong Kong folk can get to know their neighbours better, and themselves along the way - by recounting stories which are (a) true and (b) about themselves, usually in clumps of 5 or more per session, usually turned around a uniting theme, usually lasting 10 to 15 minutes, usually read from the page.
But telling it for 60 minutes without a break – that’s a tougher call. David Young deals with the challenge by upping the ante. No reading from the page: instead an easy-paced delivery to a floor-mike from a bar stool, a sort of confessional stand-up routine (except he’s seated throughout), interrupted only by taking the occasional slug from a bottle of water - or what I presume was water (he quipped at the outset it was the first time he’d done this sober). No fancy lighting changes. No sound effects. No funny voices. Just David talking…
And as confessional and supposedly sober stand-up, it works. It’s funny. He’s funny. And the laughs are well-deployed, comic milestones to mark the circumlocutions of his tales.
So what sets this apart from straight stand-up? Well, once again, it’s the story. Comedians tell you stories to make you laugh. David doesn’t. He tells his story – or, to be precise, a series of stories within stories within stories, in a multi-layered peeling-of-an-onion shaggy dog story sort of way - and he’d like you to laugh along the way with him if you’d like to - but only as an incidental.
And, as he talks, he conveys not just the significance of the story itself but also of the fact that he’s telling that story to you, his audience, in the here and now, and the fact that you might (or might not) be listening to him tell it.
I won’t try to describe here what the story (or stories-in-stories) might be. I will say that the overarching narrative turns to a significant extent around what people put on their fridges as fridge-magnets and what’s on David’s own fridge in particular.
And, as a way of thanking the audience for being there and (if they have been) for listening, each of us received on the way out a fridge magnet bearing a message (in the alternative) relating to what we’d just heard. It’s not just a momento for the evening. It’s a momento for David’s story and how it might remain with us and become a part of our own story (or stories-in-stories) for the future.
If you want to know more, go see - and more importantly hear and receive - for yourself when next he tells whatever may (or may not) be his Imposter-ish tale(s)!
The Imposter is playing September 17th. For more information, click here.
Comments
MS Bigelow
Great one person stand-up. Go prepared to be entertained, laugh and maybe cry. No matter what it will make a great night out.
15 September 2014