Lee Fenwick: Geoff the Entertainer

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Geoff the entertainer is Newcastle’s top party animal. So what if he lives on the street in a cardboard box, hasn’t washed in an indeterminate length of time, and has four different stains on his trousers (shit, vomit, blood and... not what you’d expect, actually)? “What do you wanna do?” he asks, after amply demonstrating that he is, most definitely, number one at dancing. It’s a mixed blessing: on one hand it starts to sketch out the manic bonhomie and emotional tetchiness of the street drunk – a persona that character comedian Lee Fenwick depicts energetically and well. On the other hand, it also sets the tone for a series of party games which too often feel a little aimless.

Theres’s some great moments—a shambolic ghost tour of the venue chief among them—but, as a whole, Geoff the Entertainer never quite holds together. What seems obvious on the basis of tonight’s performance is that Geoff just hasn’t got the life and soul or, indeed, the nuts and bolts of Mick Sergeant, Fenwick’s most successful character to date.

That’s not to say that Geoff doesn’t have legs: if Fenwick can begin to master the tug between pathos and hilarity, or sympathy and repulsion, there’s clearly a great deal of comic juice to be squeezed from this latest creation. But without real coherence, Geoff often feels like just that: a creation rather than person. And if he’s to avoid being a cruel caricature of the homeless—which one senses couldn’t be further from Fenwick’s intentions—Geoff needs to feel a little more real.