Review: SARAH MILLICAN - LATE BLOOMER, Orchard West - Tour
Sarah Millican has established herself as one of Britain top female standup comics and through her TV appearances and regular tours has grown a large, mainly female, following to her unique blend of saucy, verging on crude, reflections on being a woman, all delivered in her quick-fire Northern patter.
This current tour, under the title Late Bloomer started in September 2023 and will continue through next month, ending in Stockton on Tees on 17 November but with visits to Canterbury, Portsmouth, Southampton and Oxford before then. When it arrived for a two-night stay at the Orchard West in Dartford, the act was well honed and polished, and she quickly has the audience eating out of her hands. Indeed, eating is a key part of her personality and routine.
She has built her reputation and charm on the creation of a pseudo auto-biographical examination of what it is to be a woman and of her own bodily functions. It is an adult show in its description of sexual acts and use of language, but it is never offensive, and all delivered with a cheeky knowing smile that the audience simply adore. She opens her own show, which is refreshing, and notes that references to porn and drugs will be included later as a promise rather than a trigger warning. She warns us that she hates gifts that make you work, like keeping a plant or making a gingerbread house , consigning the first to the bin and the second to her stomach.
The Orchard West venue is a temporary building while the main house has the Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) removed and a testament to Dartford Council’s commitment to live arts. Both Millican and her warmup act Lou Conran delight it, describing as a f***ing tent as the noise of fireworks and motorbikes permeate the walls. But despite these distractions, it works for the 1090 audience with good foyer space, toilets and clear acoustics. Conran’s quick breathless set is slickly delivered with a devilish delight in being very naughty and in keeping with the overall tone of Millican’s set.
‘Late Bloomer’ is Millican’s own description of herself at 49 , a successful standup, as opposed to the alternative character of ‘Eager Beaver’ and she uses a notebook prop to explain the differences between these two female personalities, leaving the audience to decide which category they fit into and offering them a badge to collect on their way out to pin their coloured to their lapels. We hear extracts from a school report, her hatred of school sports and the dreaded communal showers, and a description of a photo that has recently come to light of her at school on a ski trip. These reminisces resonate with many who recall their school days, and we laugh in recognition of those forgotten feelings.
She is soon on to sex and her recollections of a magazine called More, a lifestyle magazine that ran for twenty years with a monthly sexual position and recalls the carpet burns she experienced with her husband from the wheelbarrow position! Indeed, much of her humour is derived from a self-depreciating amusement about her own body and its fluids…
She draws the audience in with her discussion of bag sizes, asking them what the oddest thing is that they have in their bags, generating easy laughs without much effort as people reveal they take French dressing with them in a jar and googly eyes to stick on things, before revealing one audience member has previously revealed she carried a stilton which covered up other bodily smells! Later she describes the horrors of floatation tanks and her interests in ‘dick pics’ (finally getting to the promised porn), what are apparently called flap snaps and the joys of Bridgerton Series 1 Episodes 5 and 7!. Throughout, she sustains a running innuendo joke that her “basket is empty” .
As promised, she ends just after 10pm to allow the ladies to get home and get their bras off by 10.15pm and sends the audience out satisfied and reassured that those feelings one gets as you bloom late are shared by many and having enjoyed a fun collective therapy session. Comedy is an essential part of venues like Orchard West’s programming and the shared experience of seeing a great comic is joyous . Sarah Millican must be one of the best modern stand-ups.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Nick Wayne