Comedy shows rooted in tragedy are not at all unusual at the Edinburgh Fringe. But Chris Grace’s ‘Sardines’ goes way beyond that.
The 51-year-old American – who had a hit last year with ‘Chris Grace as Scarlett Johannson’ – starts by asking us to pretend he has a slideshow projector. He says he doesn’t have one because he wanted to save the £600 hire fee, though one suspects it’s a distancing device to make the show feel a teensy bit less sad, and also a jokey layer to a piece that really isn’t a laugh a minute. He asks us to imagine a real photo that was taken in 2012, of his parents, two of his siblings and his partner. Then he tells us that everyone in the photo apart from him is dead.
That is so colossally heavy that there’s no real way you could make ‘Sardines’ one of those shows that starts funny and shifts gear into a conflagration: there simply wouldn’t be time to deal with FIVE DEATHS if he wasn’t talking about the passing of his nearest and dearest throughout.
In fact while Grace keeps the tone about as light as could possibly be expected – pepping things up via the mimed set, a couple of great one-liners and a fair bit of Rihanna – the show is more like a fairly straightforward account of these deaths, intertwined with a philosophical attempt to process them, to find meaning in these experiences and to explain how they changed the way he looks at the world.
The deaths are varyingly harrowing, with his mum dying in a retirement home in her ‘90s being pretty chill as these things go, and his partner dying of flu that Grace passed on to him undoubtedly the worst. Grace proves himself a wise and witty guide to all this and certainly there’s little sense that he’s in too vulnerable a state to be up on this stage (which does happen at the Fringe) - he’s had years to process most of this stuff.
As entertainment… it’s by design not really funny enough to really feel like stand-up, and I think his shying from a more overtly theatrical presentation for the sake of a couple of laughs might not have even the best idea - a little more theatricality really might have been just the thing to push it to the next level. As it is, it's a man telling you in an interesting way about the unbearable losses he has suffered… and frankly I’m pretty sure there’s an audience for that.