Brendan Scannell: The Abyss comedy review – Grief beneath the surface
A playful stand-up routine descends into a moving meditation on loving and losing someone to severe mental illness
How do you mourn someone who’s still alive? Brendan Scannell’s The Abyss starts off as a catty stand-up routine with an encompassing set-up about submersible-based water therapy. But it ends as a brilliantly cathartic monologue about the grief of caring for an immediate family member with severe mental health problems. By its climax, you just want to get out of your chair and hug him. You may well leave with goosebumps and moist eyes.
Of course, there is potentially something deeply narcissistic about mining family tragedy for performance material. Scannell is aware of the threat and works something of the self-obsessed actor persona into his patter, staving off the inference by owning it. ‘I hate it when people make these sessions all about them,’ he tells his audience, who take on the role of therapy mates. Rehab, he tells us, was like having several months of stand-up practice. We can believe it. But really, he comes across as so sweet, vulnerable and loving towards his unwell sibling that it would somehow seem churlish to question his motives.
The submersible trip down is, of course, a metaphor for all the shit Scannell is dredging up for us. As a device that places ‘slice-of-life’ stand-up comedy inside the shell of fiction, it also does interesting things to the format, which teeters somewhere between the two genres. This inventiveness might be the icing on top for those fatigued by standard Fringe comedy.
Brendan Scannell: The Abyss, Gilded Balloon Patter House, until 30 August, 9.20pm.