Diane Spencer: All-Pervading Madness
The Classic Studio, 321 Queen St, Auckland
18/03/2011 - 18/03/2011
Production Details
Rising star UK standup comedian Diane Spencer brings her brilliant new show All-pervading madness to The Classic in Auckland. Trying to get home, Diane’s standup revolves around one fateful journey from the worst gig of her life, picking up from her last show Lost in the Mouth Specific.
A mixture of storytelling and confessional stand-up, Diane is not for the faint hearted or prudish, but definitely for someone who enjoys a naughty laugh.
Nominated Best Newcomer 2011 by the Chortle Awards and Best Female by the NZ Comedy Guild in 2009, Diane has been working in the UK comedy circuit and touring festivals, bringing her bubbly, intelligent, anecdotal style of standup to delighted audiences.
Straight from the Leicester Comedy Festival and Adelaide Fringe Festival this show is also touring to the Melbourne Comedy Festival 2011.
Diane is also performing her 2010 Edinburgh Fringe and NZ Comedy Festival show Lost in the Mouth Specific, which will be recorded as a live DVD at The Classic on March 27th.
“A comic personality turned all the way up to 11.” TV3 (NZ International Comedy Festival 2010)
“…deliciously dirty, raucously rude and delightfully intelligent talent…” 4 stars, ThreeWeeks (Edinburgh Fringe 2010)
“…an honesty and humility that makes her abject embarrassment riotously hilarious…” 4 stars, Chortle (Edinburgh Fringe 2010)
The Classic Studio, Auckland
March 18 2011
8:30 p.m.
$17
1hr 25min
Variously shocking, mind expanding, battering to nice sensibilities, very funny and very entertaining!
Review by Richard Howard 19th Mar 2011
Oh yes she is funny as; and clever!
Diane Spencer an award-winning comedian from England (who began working the comedy scene in New Zealand in 2009) engages her audience in a simple narrative that covers a mere few hours late one evening while trying to get home to her boyfriend having assisted her mother to sort out an issue with a ferret.
You may already be registering just a hint of the bizarre tale that she spins (apparently all true) but you could never guess where Diane takes you in the telling, with a cleverly inter-woven series of dark, edgy and hilarious experiences and observations shooting left and right and through and around the core of the story.
This English rose, this middle class “ginga” beauty, beguiles us with her quietly glamorous, good girl appearance and then slaps our assumptions soundly within seconds of her welcome and warm up routine, in a performance where virtually no topic is off limits for comic expose; I mean no topic!
No, there are no holds or holes barred in this performance; this confident, skilled performer definitely takes us where we don’t really want to go willingly and where angels fear to tread. Diane goes there without a hint of doubt or fear. So, how does she get away with it, because she is just so nice, so gorgeous and can talk about inserting a sausage (a real cooked sausage) in her arse as if she is describing a newly learned crochet technique to an elderly maiden aunt.
The effective is at times shocking, mind expanding, battering to nice sensibilities, very funny and very entertaining! The audience laughed and lapped it up.
By the end, the narrative of the journey home and the intricacies of the seemingly unrelated descriptions and anecdotes have been ever so cleverly stitched together as one, and we glean the creative, comic intelligence behind the performance.
Diane performs one more show – All Pervading Madness, upstairs at the Classic this evening at 8.30 pm Saturday 19 March. A filmed performance of her previous show Lost in the Mouth Specific will be performed in the main Classic Comedy Club Theatre next week. It will well reward you to catch both!
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