Soho theatre, London
The comedian flops in a New York hotel room, sheds his inhibitions at an ayahuasca ceremony and visits a Berlin sex club as he explores his midlife crisis
No one zeroes in on the human comedy, the gulf dividing who we wish to be from who we actually are, quite like Simon Amstell. He clears the other stuff out of the way: it’s all about the fraught relationship between man and his interior monologue, all that shame, ego and self-consciousness getting in the way of the Zen Simon he aspires to become. It’s such a strong and identifiable comic voice, and one which, finally, only ever addresses one subject – so his new show Spirit Hole will feel familiar to fans of his work. But it still finds Amstell operating at a high level of self-analysis and comic skill, this time applied to the experience of turning 40, shedding the burden of shame, and experiencing broodiness for the first time.
That’s much to his own surprise, having assumed (in another sign of his age) that his homosexuality rendered parenting one of the few things he needn’t worry about. Entering his fifth decade, the ex-Popworld man is as anxious as ever, not least about that middle-aged milestone. He’s only able to see the flipside of compliments on his youthful looks, and everywhere observes a society terrified of old age and making a fetish of the young. Small wonder, then, that a midlife crisis propels Amstell to New York, hair dyed blond, to capitalise on his youth while he still can. Cue an undignified encounter in a hotel room, where – turned off, Amstell wonders, by his archaic use of the word “laptop”? – two young hunks run scared from this “thin, old man”.