Review: Carl Donnelly, Nottingham Playhouse
TO be fair to Carl Donnelly, at least he admitted his 'profile is nowhere near big enough for a theatre of this size' as the half full Playhouse received him on Sunday night.
But that didn't stop him putting on a show which left the small but willing crowd laughing along and feeling involved.
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Carl Donnelly
His set-up is a path well trodden by comedians - a bit of traditional stand up in the first half and then the real show in the second.
Without the interval though, it would have been somewhat hard to decipher the difference. The second half was supposed to be Donnelly reading out sections of his own 'autobiography', written for purely comic reasons, but such was his penchant for going off topic we only heard three excerpts from the book.
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And those sections, although self-deprecating and well written, left the up-and-coming comic sounding somewhat Alan Partridge-esque.
As a stand up there's no doubt Donnelly can raise a laugh, but the length of some anecdotes deserved a far heavier hitting punchline than we ever got, and the lack of a defining feature to the 31-year-old's work meant that it was all fairly routine - as part of a bill in a comedy club, he wouldn't necessarily stick in the memory.
With a tighter narrative and a dose of discipline, there's little doubt that Donnelly has the potential to deliver a memorable show - he just hasn't quite perfected the art yet.
George Solomon
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