★★★
Tiernan is very angry. Or starts that way. There is nevertheless something gently seductive about his classification of drugs, what they do, and what they’ve done to him. The obsession with popper-induced rectal prowess (‘one more crayon’) and the fellating of his father run through the show so effortlessly, that they become bricks in his bellwether wall of life as a misunderstood fourteen year old.
The personal wars waged by Tiernan between expectation and actuality generate a genuinely funny night of comic pain as the audience adapt to his view of the world and his attempts to understand and take a meaningful part in it. Not all the interactions in his crowd-work generate the belly laughs you might expect, but Tiernan somehow manages to plant time bombs in each of them that he can return to after another story of his ‘normal’ uncle on a night bus to evidence a quite brilliant mind and memory artist at work.
Maybe the odd dramatic generated pause might have assuaged the relentlessness of it all. Our chaperoned free entry into Tiernan’s world, living out every wrong turning he found himself making along the way into normalcy was still a journey worth making, even if by the end it felt like being on a fairground ride with a full stomach and one beer too many.
Dan Tiernan: All in is on at Monkey Barrel 1 at Monkey Barrel Comedy until August 24th
