Dan Antapolski, Chorley Little Theatre, 18 November 2010

Despite a number of appearances on Radio 4 and Channel 4, stand up comedian Dan Antapolski is not a household name. This was reflected in the number of seats sold for his performance at Chorley Little Theatre, which was only one third full. But Antapolski didn’t let the rows of empty seats faze him, and turned the intimate nature of the gig to his advantage.

Resplendent in beard and multi coloured jumper, he began by making conversation with an Austrian lady on the front row: “Viennese architecture not good enough for you so you thought you’d come to Chorley, eh?”

He performed for 90 minutes in total, with a slow paced opening hour. His humour might best be described as surreal and it took the audience a few minutes to tune into his understated delivery. Pondering whether to describe a female audience member as having black hair or black hairs won them over, but amongst the good one liners (“I’ve just been reading the prequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – it’s called Piglet”) there were periods where the tempo dropped.

The punchier 30 minute post interval set worked better. Antapolski returned to the stage wrestling a pantomime spider he’d found in his dressing room and with a gag deconstructing the meaning of Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman No Cry.’ (“Does he mean he doesn’t have a woman? Or that she shouldn’t cry? What was he on about?”) Linguistic analysis seemed to be his strength, as he then imagined his 6 year old daughter querying why the Jack and Jill of nursery rhyme fame didn’t drill a well at the bottom of the hill to avoid falling down the hill later.

Apart from a brief foray into political comedy (“The BNP get seen off at the General Election. And they get their revenge with that oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico”) his young daughters were the source for much of his material.

His show finished with what proved to be the highlight of his set, an energetic “Laser Rap” about the joys of owning a laser tape measure with dry ice giving the full Top Of The Pops studio effect and beams of red light bouncing off various audience members.

Billy Connolly started out as a singer whose in between chat expanded until it became his act. With Dan Antopolski, a few more songs might be the key to his career taking off.