Part way through his Australian tour, Comedian Ben Elton stopped for 2 nights performing at City Recital Hall in Sydney, NSW Australia. Elton’s 44 year career is dotted with great achievements.
These include writing and co-writing:
- TV series “The Young Ones”, “Filthy, Rich & Catflap” and “Blackadder”;
- West End plays the Olivier Award winning “Popcorn” which toured Australia and “Upstart Crow”
- West End Musicals including “We Will Rock You” and collaborating with Andrew Lloyd Webber on “The Beautiful Game” and “Love Never Dies”, the sequel to Phantom.
- Along with a good collection of novels covering a number of genres.
With a solid reputation in Australia, much of Elton’s tour has been sold out. There are still seats available at a few of the venues remaining and an additional night has been added in Brisbane on 2 April.
Being a writer, Elton prefers to fully script his shows, delivering them in your face with a full force of energy and rapid, machine gun fire speed. There are very few lulls in the monologue which means you need to pay attention throughout the evening.
Titled “Authentic Stupidity”, Elton said recently in an interview with UK’s Channel 4 News, that all of his comedy shows could have been called the same. He loves to point out the ridiculous parts of life we forget to notice. When we do see it, we just shrug and accept it as “just what it is” when we could stand up and force change for the benefit of the majority.
Topics touched upon included A.I., voluntary euthanasia, the cringeworthy details of ageing and a poke at Gen X and Gen Z. For the majority of topics it was clear where Elton stood though, occasionally he would sway in his opinion, leaving the audience unable to grasp where he “stood in his truth”. One such topic was the “Woke” movement describing their blue hair and his insightful way of recognising their tattoos. He felt the movement considered the unborn child and the old person as sacred but not any other age in between. Yet, amongst the audience members after the show, they were questioning whether full term abortion was a way to treat someone as sacred.
He also touched on the LGBT etc etc. movement with its ever increasing letters. One moment Elton would poke fun. The next moment, he was saying they were all beautiful and had a right to be themselves, his defensive hands up as if to say “don’t throw the rotten tomatoes please.”
The topic of Trump and Musk made the room initially very silent and the vibe noticeably dropped. All were interested to hear his viewpoint. Elton seemed very much against Musk, suggesting that, during his interview with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, there was opportunity to call the SAS to shoot Musk. He brought up the fact Musk was “unelected” which is a surprising parroting of the current narrative. After all, it’s worth considering that no auditor in the world is ever elected, nor is there an election available for the people to elect such a position.
Elton didn’t hold back on his left wing views and labelled them as such. Even the voluntary euthanasia jokes continued despite a coolness from the crowd. He laboured for some time on his views of this topic. Here is where a fully scripted solo show can become a little brittle. There is, in fact, ample opportunity to gauge the vibe of the crowd in each venue and adapt the script to provide maximum entertainment value. However, a fully scripted show drives on like a freight train and can lose some audience members along the way.
One great strength, built from his many years of comedy writing, is Elton’s talent for story telling. The visuals are so very clear and the characters each become a lucid image in our minds. We can picture the whole scene being played out which really does make for many laughs.
We loved hearing about his work with Ronnie Corbett and Corbett’s appreciation of Elton giving him a rude “knob” joke. Perhaps Elton prefers to focus his script on timely topics but we really loved hearing these anecdotes about working with other British performers. He briefly mentioned Rik Mayall at the very end. We would have loved to hear more about working with this marvellous performer. Perhaps he will include more anecdotes next time around.
Being based in Australia, the travel is cheap to do another tour and Ben Elton’s following will be keen to sell out the concert halls for him again.
Over all, there were no “boos”, only a few groans and he got plenty of laughs which, each time, would draw a little smile to his face. As a writer, he would be noting when he hit the mark. The audience were in a great mood and were keen to be entertained so, any Elton opinion that was not in alignment with their own was set aside.
Elton continues his tour visiting Canberra, Newcastle and Queensland, then eight cities in New Zealand.
Related links
Ben Elton’s Tour dates through Australia and New Zealand: https://benelton.live/
What’s on in Sydney at City Recital Hall? https://www.cityrecitalhall.com/whats-on/
