Ben Target had a shit hot debut stand-up show in the form of 2012’s bonker, prop-heavy ‘Discover Ben Target’, which saw him nominated for best newcomer at that year’s Edinburgh comedy awards.
And then… well, by his own account, he hit a rough patch and failed to build on that initial momentum. He didn’t exactly go away, either, but nor did he become a household name.
‘Lorenzo’, though, is not so much a comeback as something else entirely: a storytelling show in which an older Target looks back on his life with something like a survivor’s eye.
It’s also, very specifically, about a man named Lorenzo, an eccentric Hong Kong-born architect who Target’s architect grandfather had taken into the family’s ramshackle Chelsea home, and who Target had grown up regarding as a sort of uncle. The family lost the house after Target’s grandparents passed away, and Lorenzo had gone his own way, but as the pandemic commenced and the elderly Lorenzo required home help and palliative care, the out-of-work Target agreed to move in.
If you’re expecting stories of wacky inter-generational hijinks… there is definitely some of that here. Like Lorenzo sending Target out for a specific brand of coffee that it turns out hadn’t actually been made in decades. Or sabotaging Target’s job interview by ringing the prospective employer to pester Target with trivial queries.
Directed by the late Adam Brace – or as Target himself points out, partly directed by Brace who tragically passed away before it was finished – this is not a stand-up set, but something more bittersweet and melancholic. Target is extremely candid about how difficult he found life with Lorenzo; but he intersperses this with reminiscence about his own difficult formative years and how Lorenzo was a supportive figure during them. As he puts it near the end ‘he was the only adult who made me feel safe’.
To be honest it didn’t fully click into place for me for a long time. Target’s gentle delivery has a sightly not all there, post-therapy quality, and – accepting this is quite probably a ‘me’ problem – I couldn’t really get swept up in it as a big chewy, entertaining story, even though it was at the least gesturing at being that.
But in the last 15 minutes – which I won’t spoil – it sort of breaks free from the shackles of jauntiness and fully embraces its inner melancholy. It shifts from the anecdotal to the transcendent, becoming a meditation on the importance of looking back at your life and accepting it for what it was, accepting you are older, and saying goodbye to what came before kindly. In the end, a beautiful and wise work.