What price a brain that could let go? You’d pay any price for that brain.
Ivo Graham’s crippling addiction to the past, now in more self-parodying territory than ever as he literally names his show after the most nostalgic scene of the most nostalgic TV show, is something that, in the long run, he wants and needs to let go of. In the meantime, however, he’s turned it into a career. And this year, in this show, he’s taking it to a whole new level.
People will splash about in the shallow end with you, but they might not come out to sea.
After eighteen months of house arrest, Ivo returned to the Fringe in 2022 with a story to tell, a story that was about a lot more than just doing gigs on Zoom and waiting for the pubs to re-open. Although there was a fair bit of that too, of course. As his comedy veered closer to #realtalk than ever before, and he wrestled with how much patience comedy audiences might have for the wranglings of his inner life, a side-quest of purest destiny appeared before him: the theatre section.
You hold onto everything in your life even though you know more than anyone just how much damage that can do.
2022’s My Future, My Clutter had already exorcised a fair few of the ghosts of Ivo’s childhood, dredged up and dusted off during a lockdown spent in his parents’ house. In 2023, over the course of ten clandestine work-in-progresses in the Pleasance Green, he brought the full feelings box out to play. Rejected Taskmaster prizes, receipts that changed everything, remembrances of loved ones on the other side, rarely has so much of a life been unpacked in an hour, or so deftly. An experiment intended as a low-key overshare instantly felt like something he wanted to take further. And in 2024, here we are.
You know that talking doesn’t become theatre just because you put music underneath it.
In Carousel, Ivo’s obsession with music as a mirror for his own mental state – now being more aggressively platformed in Gig Pigs podcasts, radio round tables, and his desperate lunge towards becoming a DJ – has found a thrilling new purpose. Long convinced that he was more qualified than anyone else to pick the songs for the house party, the road trip, even the birth of his child, Ivo has woven the music of his life into the story of his life to thrilling effect here: a series of calculations that will raise the hairs on your neck and have you grasping for the playlist link on the way out. He can’t write music, but he sure knows how to cue it.
No one else lives like you do.
In some ways this show is not a million miles from Ivo’s stand-up: one man, alone onstage, picking over his past. But in tone and execution it is completely different: a searing monologue addressed not to the audience but to himself. It’s the most highly evolved navel gazing you’ll see at the Fringe but it’s also some of the most gripping. It is the product of a single train journey and the work of an entire life. Come and let it blow you away.
