Material world

Even in Edinburgh, a city mythologised for its level-playing-field festival Fringe, there is a noticeable distinction between the raucous comedy audience and its more reverential theatrical sister. The very act of deciding, as a producer, whether a comic play appears in the comedy or theatre section of the official programme can influence how, and by whom, that production will be received.

Comedy, in particular standup comedy, is in the middle of a strange cultural moment. Its increasing popularity is undisputed, its output increasingly varied and interesting, but it has long faced a struggle for acceptance among the guardians of high-brow culture. The highly regarded comedian Simon Munnery, in a response to a 2009 review calling his work “the closest comedy gets to being art,” joked about making the leap from comedian to “shit artist,” highlighting the wrong-headed perception that standup occupies the lowest rung on the cultural ladder.

So it is perhaps unsurprising to see an increasing number of comics moonlighting as thespians. And, through the Comedians Theatre Company, one can almost say that they’ve unionised.

“The idea behind the Comedians Theatre Company was to show that comedians could do other things,” says Matthew Osborn, the playwright (and standup comic) behind the company’s latest Fringe offering, Shopping Centre. “I think to a greater or lesser extent all standup performances are acting. And also, being a standup comedian makes you enormously conscious of what the audience are doing and how they’re reacting. I don’t know…if you’re just an actor, you are conscious of the audience; but as a standup your focus is the audience.”

Since its founding in 2006 by Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning standup Phil Nichol and director Maggie Inchley, the Comedians Theatre Company has become a significant player in Fringe theatre. Indeed, in recent years, it has gone from producing good, solid adaptations of established plays to developing and performing new writing of its own. 

After Cul-de-sac—the first production to come out of the company's new writing project, Itch: A Scratch Event—received near-universal acclaim at last year’s Fringe, Osborn returns with Shopping Centre; a play which examines contemporary consumerism. “It’s inspired by a story that happened in Ikea in north London a few years ago. When it was opening, they had a lot of special offers on—sofas for twenty quid and stuff like that—and people got so excited that they queued overnight. When the doors were finally opened they all barged in. There ended up being a big fight, almost a riot, and that idea I found funny and interesting.”

Shopping Centre takes place during such a riot, and follows the story of a down-on-his-luck loner, while looking at just what it is that makes people so wildly, rapidly obsessed with cheap consumer goods. But Osborn is careful not to be preachy. “I think it’s too easy to say that it’s entirely wrong that people have these relationships with objects, particularly because there are objects that people have a relationship with that are quite positive. Like when someone’s handed their father’s watch. Some objects have a sentimentality, a value to them, and so I didn’t want to be so simplistic as to say consumerism is bad. I wanted to look at the power these things have over people.”

Osborn writes in such a way as to betray his roots as a comedian. In much the same way that an observational comic has the capacity to bring fresh perspective to the most everyday and mundane facets of life, Osborn is shining a new light on that most humdrum of institutions. "The shopping centre is one of these places that gets neglected. It’s one of these places where people spend so much of their time and even though people might not realise it, they are hugely important places for good or ill. But they get ignored and people don’t think about them enough or they don’t realise how important they are.

"It is an unfashionable thing to admit – it’s a lot more fashionable to say I like going to the farmers’ market or the deli. But most people don’t do that. And so shopping centres bring a whole world to people, but of course they bring with them all sorts of peculiar and unpleasant things and wanted to explore all of that."

There is a strong dystopian current running through the piece, in much the same way as with the Orwellian Cul-de-sac. Indeed, Osborn wears his literary influences proudly. “I’m a big fan of Orwell. I’m always conscious of the misery that human beings can inflict on others. For Shopping Centre, the big influence is JG Ballard. It deals with the cold, hard, shiny modernity of the kind of bleak inhuman world that Ballard captures.”

In a city which celebrates smart, literate and darkly funny theatre, comedians such as Osborn are pushing their way into more refined reaches of the Fringe programme. And doing so with some style.