Russell Brand – Vector Arena (Review)

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What Russell Brand would have you believe tonight’s show was about, and what it was actually about, are two very different things.

Brand came onstage, a good half-hour later than scheduled, following a montage of aren’t-you-shocked photos of homeless people and Abu Ghraib prisoners and street protests and clips of Brand himself being interviewed on various news outlets around the world. He promised us a political, a socially active, show. But that’s not really what we got.

What we got was an hour and a quarter of a very, very skilled comedian delivering a superbly funny routine about, essentially, why he hates Rupert Murdoch — “all I really have to say in Auckland is that he’s Australian.” Brand is, indeed, a very talented performer. He commands the stage and owns the audience with a charisma that he oozes quite effortlessly, it seems. His content is predictably foul and atrocious — a gay Adolf Hitler masturbating over a  particularly gorgeous blonde marine was among tonight’s highlights — and consistently extremely funny.

He’s also a quite profoundly self-indulgent individual. The first fifteen minutes or so of the show were a sharply-observed take on New Zealand that showed he’d done a little more research than simply flicking through his Lonely Planet on an Air New Zealand flight — talking about bigoted television commentators, he passingly commented “Mike Hosking — he’s your racist, right?” He dropped repeated remarks into his spiel about the flag-referendum fiasco, he clearly sensed that he couldn’t go far wrong laying into John Key, and he delighted in the fact that Hamilton — he knew to call it The Tron — is the chlamydia capital of the country, a fact he revisited throughout the show. But he also revisited himself a little more than might be ideal. Brand has, over the last few years, tried to re-invent himself as some form of social activist, but has managed to make something of a fool of himself publicly in the process. Never was this more evident than in an interview with Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s Newsnight. When he had the opportunity for unfettered monologue, Brand was eloquent and intelligent; when Paxman challenged him on, well, anything, he tried to deflect attention away from his inability to answer the question by mocking the interviewer. And tonight, he revisited his Newsnight appearance, projecting a recording on the interview onto a giant screen behind him and providing a running commentary, as well as a series of excuses for his poor performance. Once that was over, he spent a good ten minutes reviewing a show he’d done about pretending to join the US Marine Corps. Very look-at-me, but at the same time exceedingly funny.

Someone had, at one point, told Brand that since he looked a little like a gothic heroin-addict Jesus, he could play at being a messiah. He’s still not quite let go of that conceit, and throughout the show insisted on teasing the possibility of the unveiling of a new world order. Instead, the focus remained largely on Brand and his ego. It’s all well and good to dismiss the Oscars ceremony as a, and I quote directly here, “cunt paddock,” but to then play video of yourself in that same paddock, presenting an Oscar, doesn’t really play well. He did, to be fair, try to offer the context that he wanted to point out how he was staring at Helen Mirren’s cleavage, but what he was really doing was saying “Hey, look at me — I’m standing next to Helen Mirren.”

He tried to tell us that he wants to use his narcissism for social justice. In reality, he’s doing the inverse. But that can, to a very large degree, be forgiven. Brand’s form of social justice, a brief and passing mention of Auckland Action Against Poverty at the very end of the show notwithstanding, is almost entirely a matter of form, with precious little substance. But oh, what form it was.

You can forgive the man when he’s as funny as he was tonight. Yes, he’s a narcissistic man-child in leather pants and a messiah complex, but he’s a bloody entertaining one. He’s funny, he’s beautiful, he’s charismatic, and he knows damned well that he is. So when he walks into the audience to have a bit of a random piss-take, about fifteen minutes into the show, he knows he’s going to get a good reception. And while his after-show selfie-and-autograph session at the front of the stage is as much about stoking his ego as it is anything else, many members of the audience, who laughed loud and long throughout the show, go the chance to meet their hero.

Russell Brand is not the messiah. He’s a very funny man.

Steve McCabe

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