one4review | On 10, Aug 2022

Harriet Dyer talks and it’s delightful, and she also talks with her hands, and that is wonderful. They do something almost like sign language: story elements’ positions in space are described in relation to each other, or a person acquires not just a name in spoken words, but also a gesture that tells you something more about them, or reminds you who they are. It really brings everything to life.

This is a show about some bits of Ms Dyer’s life, and it’s got the warning in the title. Some shitty things have happened to her, though they’re sketched with just enough detail to get the outline and not much more. And while those are maybe the catalyst for the show and an element of it, the much more important part is the warm and undemanding invitation to see the world through Ms Dyer’s quirky, lightly-absurd and decidedly sideways lens. Ms Dyer’s stage presence is such that nothing is required of the audience but to listen, and her self-assurance, mastery of her material, and sense of peace with her own self, mean that it doesn’t matter if we’re not rolling in the aisles laughing (though some of her funny did almost result in that), Ms Dyer’s still giving a performance of understated excellence.

Ms Dyer has a disarming manner with her crowd work, and seems like a nice person. She finds humour to challenge and mitigate the darkness. She’s as good at delivering the unscripted asides which occur to her magpie mind as she is the main flow of the show, and they fit right in to her style of branching and diverging narratives. This is a fabulous hour from a delightful comedian with a sense of the joyful absurdity of life. Entirely charming.

Reviewed by Laura

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose
16:20