Edinburgh Festival 2018: Jordan Brookes's 'Bleed' offers a visionary ability for envelope-pushing

Its success really depends on whether the audience want to submit to being part of this experiment.

(Dee McCourt)

How far can you stretch a show about the neurotic self-indulgence which lurks at the heart of many a comedian’s work, before you’ve created a neurotic, self-indulgent show?

I’m still not sure I know after watching the new Fringe work by last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee Jordan Brookes, because for all its in-your-face oddness and technical gimmickry, Brookes is still clearly a guy with a huge degree of comedic skill and a visionary ability for envelope pushing.

Whether this all completely translates into Bleed is open to question, however. As it turns out, the entire show is founded on the fact Brookes is trying to tell one observational anecdote; that a joke he used to tell onstage about his ex-girlfriend is the reason they split up.

Yet he keeps getting distracted, whether contorting his body into absurd physical shapes to disorientate any audience members who want to drift off, or throwing an existential aside at a couple in the front row about how they’ll never really know each other, and then hammering it home with ever greater seriousness.

The woman in this situation – whether through shyness or a sense of perturbance at Brookes’ intense demeanor – seemed genuinely freaked out by this, and it’s not hard to sympathise.

Brookes’ performance is assertive and regularly genuinely hilarious, but as he reveals an elaborate and very well worked trick to take us within his internal monologue (spoiler: he’s thinking dirty thoughts) the absurdism stretches to the point where he’s almost daring us to say we’re still enjoying the show.

Bleed is a very well-worked piece of experimental comedy theatre; but its success really depends on whether the audience want to submit to being part of this experiment.