Angus Dunican: The Great Indoors

• Laura Ennor
• 3 August 2014

This article is from 2014

credit: Steve Ullathorne

A likeable, sweet personality can't save this predictable Free Fringe performance

It would be hard to leave this show without really liking Angus Dunican. He’s the guy you want in your friendship group, livening up social gatherings with his self-deprecating tales of whimsy and woe. But pub anecdotes is about as far as The Great Indoors gets, and his dreamy, artistic man-child schtick (you know the drill – rises at noon, spends day building forts in the living room, has long-suffering ‘proper adult’ girlfriend) is sweet, but predictable.

There’s something of a theory in here about home and its comforts and how they contribute to our identities, which is easy to agree with, but simply not funny enough. The knowing asides he chucks out after a punchline fall flat, even though they’re delivered in a wild-eyed, rubber-jawed way that has a touch of the Rik Mayalls about it. The ideas are nice and the running theme makes this a fairly cohesive hour as it is, so it seems unnecessary when Dunican shoehorns in awkward references to a recurring avian character in an attempt to create those neat narrative arcs that, done right, can provide an ‘aaaahh’ moment of admiration in audiences. If that’s awkward, the faintly desperate cry of ‘see?! Structure!’ that follows is a meta-comedic cringe too far.

Laughing Horse @ Jekyll and Hyde, 225 2022, until 24 Aug (not 14, 21), 7.45pm, free.