Highly regarded in America, Mike Birbiglia, a seasoned stand-up comedian and comic storyteller, writes and performs a monologue he wrote lasting 1 hour and 20 minutes in which he contemplates and confronts illness and mortality.
He is life-threateningly funny. He has type 2 diabetes and bladder cancer. His dad and his granddad had heart attacks at 56. He is in his forties. He describes visits to the doctor. He talks of breathing difficulties and wonders if he has just had a cardiac arrest.
He tells how he jumped out of a window whilst sleepwalking and that he now sleeps in a zipped-up sleeping bag to stop a repeat. He recalls a phone call to his mother. ‘I love you, mum,’ he says. There is a pause at the other end. ‘Take care,’ she replies and hangs up. It’s the best she can do.
The stage is bare. He has a chair which he moves about the stage and rarely sits on. He performs against a curving wall of blue graph paper, representing a wave, and looking like the tiles of a swimming pool.
He chats easily but tends to slur his words and not everything he says is always audible. He has charm. The audience on the press night laughed very loudly; and sometimes too obviously on cue.
Mike Birbiglia is in London for only 4 weeks.
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