A bittersweet love letter to the Edinburgh fringe, performed by a middle-aged Scotsman? I may be the optimum audience member for Jack Docherty’s teasingly autobiographical (or is it?) anti-romcom, but there’s plenty here to engage a wider demographic. After four decades as a sketch comic, chatshow host and most recently star of the sitcom Scot Squad, Docherty is starring here for the first time as “himself”, in a solo show that recounts the fallout from a one-night stand 30 years ago. It conjures compellingly with ageing and regret, lives unlived and the painful difference between the real world and the movies.
The stripped-back aesthetics, Docherty’s direct address and the verifiable biographical details all suggest a true story, which begins when the Absolutely star is riding high on his 1980s celebrity at the fringe. He locks eyes with a woman in his crowd; a picture-perfect fling – on Arthur’s Seat, of course – ensues. But Docherty never lingers there for long. Nothing But flits restlessly between 1989 and 2018, when the balding 56-year-old returns to the fringe, trying to recover a little of his youthful glory – and some of the romance, too, with which his experiences of the festival are terminally associated.
The cinematic reference point here is Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Sunset, refashioned for a city where, in August, the sun is seldom seen to rise at all. Docherty’s project is to reveal the tragedy of a life spent in hock to romantic fantasies. We want to root for his amorous fulfilment, but he makes us wonder whether we should, portraying himself (or his fictional alter ego?) as a bad husband and dad, jealous of young male comedians while prospecting for sex with their female fans. Vivid word-pictures bring these tawdry misadventures to carnal-comic life.
Ideally, you’d be watching Nothing But on the Edinburgh fringe, where it began, and to which – as a site where, for a precious few weeks each year, fantasy eclipses real life and youthful dreams come true – the show pays complicated tribute. But even 400 miles south, its story of Docherty pulling back the curtain at last on his long-cherished parallel life hits home.
At Soho theatre, London, until 30 April and at the Gilded Balloon at the Museum, Edinburgh, 3-19 August
