Come Heckle Christ

100487 original

Joshua Ladgrove's performance as Christ, in which he invites the audience to berate him, arrives in Edinburgh replete with accusations of blasphemy. Inevitably, this brings a frisson to the show. We enter the venue to find Ladgrove as Christ on the cross, meekly welcoming the audience as his flock, offering the Messiah up as a target for an inquisitive crowd. Consequently, by the end of the the show, this Christ has delivered his verdict on squirrels, taken a selfie, and twerked.

But this is an idea which is much better than its execution. This Christ is without any coherent personality, and so the comedic riffing is never meaningfully developed. And Ladgrove's comebacks are not good enough, often relying on pedantry and unexamined Bible references to make points which are correct, but neither funny nor revealing. Considering there are topics bound to arise—Christ's relationship with his Father, science versus religion, carpentry—you would expect prepared material on these which might say something about faith, love, or why an audience would choose to spend an evening bellowing at Christ at all. Ladgrove's side-stepping of a query about Gaza demonstrates his timidity – this Messiah unfortunately has no sermon to deliver.

That said, this is a funny show, but solely because the audience does some cracking heckling, often delivering significantly better comebacks than the performer. That the crowd begins to probe Ladgrove about his own personal life—rather than Christ's—shows their lack of faith in the performance on offer. This suggests there are few converts here.