Pleasance Bunker
Aug 2-27 (20:10)
Instar Omnium
Andre de Freitas limps onto stage with a bashful grin on his face and opens his set by apologising, and explaining that he’d been out celebrating a 5 star review the night before. This had, ‘of course’ he explained resulted in him injuring himself. ‘The Portuguese believe that whenever something good happens, something bad is sure to follow soon after’. It’s this deep rooted Calvinistic pessimism, so shared by The Scots with our ‘If we score against Brazil, we’ll end up losing by 3’ attitude to life, and football, which brings out the kind of unashamed and un-romanticised raw, dark, material into Andre’s set. He handles these themes with such a deft, light, and charming manner, that he is able to make his way through the audience over the course of this hour, reeling each of them in hand luring them into laughing at masturbation at funerals, homelessness, sucidality, schizophrenia, and becoming a sex worker. Given the themes being covered in the show it’s a sign of the incredible maturity of this performance that it feels like ‘a normal stand up show’ for a broad range of demographics, and this is evidenced by Andre’s success in capturing every single member of the crowds attention, admiration, and affection before the time is out. In one particularly hilarious exchange, he even manages to accidentally get his undercover PR Agent in stitches.
He spends a significant portion of the show pondering, and discussing, what it means to be Portuguese, to come from a ‘culture of sadness’. Here the commonality with Scottish self-deprecation, gallows humour, and making light work of generational trauma allows him to quickly pull the audience into his cultural perspective. It’s genuinely fascinating hearing him discuss the changes in his own self-identity which occur when speaking, performing, and even having sex, in English. He riffs on polyglot trauma-escapism, the flirty colonial approach of Spanish imperialists in South America, and cunning use of the Portuguese word for ‘proctologist’ as a self-defence technique on New York’s subways. There is also possibly the funniest, bizarrely heart-warming, 10 minutes spent discussing a mans love affair with a table lamp. Really, you’ll need to trust me on that one, or go listen to ‘Stick it Out’ by Frank Zappa. It’s this 10 minute section in particular which highlights the aspect of Andre’s stage performance which elevates him from funny to genuinely ‘big-time’. The material relating to his time spent working as a male escort could easily turn into a confessional series of gross-out tales. Rather than this he mines laughs from every aspect of the stories he’s telling, including some gut-bustingly funny physical work with his microphone which is both nuanced and obscene.
All of his material, his interactions with the audience which border on cockiness but never arrogance, and his observations about the world at large are imbued with a deep sense of compassion, though he never wears this on his sleeve as a badge of honour. I suspect that he may be one of chose charmed individuals who is so naturally funny, charming, and depressingly handsome, that he developed this connection to others as a kind of defence mechanism against accusations, or fears, of perceived aloofness.
All of this marks out our man as ‘star material’, as do the regularity and volume of laughs echoing around the venue, underground vault cum nuclear bunker as it is. Every member of the audience by the end of the show has visibly and audibly found aspects of the material, and Andre, which they can relate to. It’s rare to walk out of a show performed by an artist you haven’t heard of before and know that you’ve watched a nailed on future prime time star. Andre de Freitas however is quantifiably the real deal.
Ewan Law
Mumble Comedy 