Review – Simon Keck: Nob Happy Sock

It’s not often you enter a performance space to find the performer dangling above the stage on a harness, mocked up to look like he’s hung himself. In fact, I can probably count the number of times that’s happened to me on one hand. Still, that’s the scene the audience is greeted with when they sit down to watch Simon Keck perform in ‘Nob Happy Sock‘.

It’s a show about depression, seeking help, and suicide, but it’s one that approaches it with humor, sensitivity, and a brilliantly genuine voice that, if you have your own history with depression and suicide, will grip you to the core of your very being and make you laugh about it, which is an incredibly rare thing.

Keck presents the material not so much as a stand up show, but as an evolving one man narrative piece that is honestly engaging the whole way through. A lot of work, not to mention care and attention, has gone in to this show and it has paid off. At no time does the humor feel exploitative of mental illness, nor does it ever become so dreary you forget you’re at a comedy show.

If you’re not able to see the show in the flesh, you are truly missing out on an amazing piece of small-scale theatre and, should it ever come around again, you should go out of your way to see it. It deserves to be seen, it needs to be seen. It is that powerful a performance.

You can see it every day except Mondays until the 21st of April.