As he prepares to take on the personage of Satan himself, Marcus Brigstocke chats to Ruth Seavers about what to expect from his malevolent new standup show.
Marcus Brigstocke’s Devil May Care tour is the first time he’s done standup as anyone other than himself. The comic and TV panellist’s caricature of Lucifer serves as a better mouthpiece for modern moral dilemmas than himself, he says:
“The idea of the show is to look at how complicated good and evil have become. When Lucifer, or ‘the beast’, appeared in the Garden Of Eden, there were seven deadly sins and soon after, the 10 commandments. Now, with social media and the world being much more connected than it’s ever been, there are millions of billions of sins that people decide on every day.
“And we write each other off very quickly. One person who voted to leave the EU meets a person who voted remain, and as far as those two people are concerned the other one is evil. We seem to have lost the meaning of what evil or sin actually is. So that’s kind of what the show is about: playing with the audience’s expectation of what is sinful. It’s a blast.”
So what sparked the show’s idea? “I was looking at how divided the world is right now: Brexit, Trump, Israel, Palestine… the world is ripped in half at the moment. For me, it was about asking, ‘what is that about?’ The more I thought about it, the more I thought, ‘I don’t actually really want to talk about this from my own point of view, because I’m just one of the people within it.’
“So I started thinking – how can I look at it from outside? And I thought Lucifer would give a fascinating perspective on what this is, because he is credited with having been responsible for the fall of man, for introducing good and evil to the world.
“I’m not religious myself,” Brigstocke clarifies, “neither am I anti-religious. But I’m very interested in sin and good and evil and how we define those things – how those things are understood. Because we talk to more people more often than we ever have before – yet people, more often than they used to, feel lonely and isolated. It’s quite a peculiar paradox.”
Discussing accessibility to comedy, he says, “Class division in the UK remains stubbornly absolutely entrenched in society. It’s extraordinary how we have failed to move on from that. Sadly, those who are going to see comedy now are those who can afford to. There are a lot of people working their asses off, doing two jobs, still not making enough money to pay the rent and put food on the table. That is deliberate. That is a deliberate choice made by those in government to keep them in that position. There are things that can be done to address that.”
Citing a mixture of comedy clubs and Edinburgh Fringe as central to his success, Brigstocke won the BBC Comedian Of The Year award in 1996 while still in university. He did “five to 10 years with a minimum of five shows a week. But it’s different now,” he says. “I was a judge on the BBC New Comedy Awards and out of 10 acts, I saw four or maybe five that were really, really good.”
A lot of people with the platform to speak now are doing so very tentatively – avoiding declarative language and choosing to remain in safety zone of vague and interpretive language. Is Lucifer a chance to channel that?
“It’s like journalism broke,” he says. “It’s near impossible to get to the truth of something because truth is such a complicated thing.” Maybe such a divided world has created more laughter in response, as the increasing benchmark of the quality he cites seems to suggest.
Marcus Brigstocke, Devil May Care, Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Sat 22 Sept; Savoy Theatre, Monmouth, Fri 19 Oct. Tickets: £19/£17.50. Info: www.shermantheatre.co.uk / www.monmouth-savoy.co.uk
