I don’t know if I ever want to see any show like Howl ever again. I have never felt anything walking away from a comedy show as wrenching as Howl. Yet it might be one of the funniest shows I have ever seen, quite possibly the best.
Within moments of walking on stage, Robins has the crowd feeding from him, acknowledging his podcasting/radio in-jokes with certain ease, befriending the oblivious front row seats unaware of this other life he leads as a mere voice from the machine. Hysterical is his banality, his story a simple criss-crossing of the horrendous lived stresses of the most mundane of activities – the homeware contemplation, the reflection on halogen lighting’s demise. The topic is irrelevant, the manner of his delivery crucial.
Every contemplation is ached over, every struggle tortured into something beautifully existential. In retrospect, it is a marvellous extorting of the inner battles that thrive over the tedium and mundane. We can never understand Robins’ head, yet we come so close to living it. His articulations of every thought breathe life into something otherwise negligible, his material irrelevant to a broader catharsis, yet hilarious when exposed for all Robins’ deepest pretensions and fears. In recounting them, Robins is beyond, moving above the caricature of himself that draws indistinguishably from his reality.
The cause of such oversharing, such minutely concentrated stories stretched into minutes of rich joy, is the bridle of Robins’ health, his relationship with anxiety and the alcohol that tries and fails to sooth the lowest lows that leave his world agonisingly monochrome. Howl is a seesaw, dancing from the delight of everyday occurrences, acted with fierce expression or casual disinterest depending on the stress of said story, with the bitter low of addiction, the struggle to conquer an obstacle in alcohol that continues to present itself as a wretched solution. Friends, family, strangers from a distance watch and engage with concern yet the power is lost for anything to stop a slow demise into despair and surely worse. What lingers is the intimacy with which we are brought into not only what Robins has done, but every inner thought and crippling doubt that has led to said action. Where, in comedy, we expect to be given revisionist tales that tap into humoured sensibility, Robins is unflinchingly open, his reality trapped between only his mind’s inclinations, and us who he has invited in to observe.
Held in Greyfriars Church Hall, Robins was seeking neither forgiveness nor repentance for his past, only an acknowledgement that he is on a journey to which the answer remains unknown. Like his other show at the Fringe, he is a work in progress. The typical feel-good circler of a joke that ties a typical show together is made redundant by the never-ending journey of rehabilitation and sobriety that Robins is bracing for.
At the end of a heavy Fringe schedule, and with the show still set to tour into the New Year, by then Howl may reform, evolving as Robins himself comes to terms with, and can reflect upon, a year of sobriety. For now though, may Howl stand as everything John Robins is, everything he has endured, and the necessary confrontation with the enemy he has tackled. May it also stand as further proof of just how delightfully funny he is, and what a man he can be. The romanticism of the tortured artist lives on, if even the end of suffering is in sight.
John Robins: Howl is performing at Just the Tonic Nucleus (Greyfriars church) until 27 August. Tickets can be found here.
Image courtsey of John Robins, provided to The Student as press material