The dates on Catherine Bohart’s new tour are being advertised, she tells us, as “relaxed performances”. Eyebrows arch. Bohart is not a relaxed performer – and Again, With Feelings is her least sedate show yet. It’s also her best, a firecracker of an hour about the push-and-pull of settling down in your mid-30s, particularly when you’re queer, stressy, and knee-deep in the wreckage of relationships past.
Neither the subject nor the 35-year-old’s approach to it is especially innovative. But this is as big-hitting as straightforward autobiographical standup gets, a set in which compelling personality (and complete mastery of that persona) meets line after line packed with unexpected jokes, whipsmart backchat and animated expressivity. This is Bohart even further on the front foot than we found her in 2022’s This Isn’t for You, when the Irishwoman’s manic chatter was applied to her experience of enduring a breakup under lockdown.
Maybe she is blessed with a good audience tonight; maybe she makes it so. Certainly her impromptu interactions with a man in the front row, who pipes up when she’s talking about age-gap relationships, showcase a performer so hair-trigger funny and in the zone that we know instantly we’re in capable hands.
These early stages introduce Bohart’s new romance, by way of a few palate-cleansing gags about queer relationships. Soon, her busybody mum is asking awkward questions about the prospect of grandchildren, sending Bohart into an anxiety spiral that sweeps up in its wake sperm banks, an uncomfortable new role for her brother, and her secret distaste for boys with lesbian parents.
Some of this is ostentatiously inappropriate. But Bohart gets away with it, usually with an aren’t-I-awful moue and the zip with which she powers on to the next self-mortifying anecdote – about a retrograde step into house-sharing, or the unlikely method she deployed to save her last, ailing relationship. Another routine advertises Bohart’s love of outrageous gossip, and the show itself feels like gossip refined to a high art: thirtysomething panic distilled into a torrent of wisecracks and unwise confidences, as clocks tick and big decisions loom.