Nina Conti - The Dating Show

I’ve seen Nina Conti do her ventriloquism thing more times than I care to admit to, and the act is always pretty much the same. We'll start with some monkey business with Monkey, her naughty pal she keeps in a shopping basket. She'll then draw a couple of stooges from the audience, strap some masks to their faces, and speak for them. You might reasonably wonder why anyone would want to see that more than once. The answer is simple - there is no one to match her, both with regard to her technical ability and her brilliant improvisational skills. Ironically, she is such a good ventriloquist it's all too easy to forget that everything funny happening on stage is coming out of her head and her tight lipped mouth.
 
Her new show revolves loosely - and it is very loosely - around match making. I have a hunch that the initial concept was to get two potential lovebirds up on stage, and then have Nina vicariously woo them through the medium of the latex mask. It would have made sense of the show’s title, and would have been fun, but we're well into the tour now, so perhaps she struggled to find enough singletons to keep the joke going. Instead we got a couple of false starts before an established couple were asked to re-enact their date in, of all places, the Sainsbury Centre at UEA. The couple were, no doubt, lovely people, but failed to grasp that they had to play their part, so while Nina battled on gamely, the routine never quite ignited. It was still funny, charming and good natured, though, so perhaps I've just been spoiled by previous routines with more demonstrative meat puppets. It only goes to show what a precarious tightrope she walks, relying on good natured stooges and the ability to feed off of the cues they mutely send out. Fortunately, as the audience relaxed, the routines got better and better, culminating into hilarious chaos as four work colleagues lapped up their moment in the sun.
 
She also relies, of course, on her ability as a ventriloquist, and that is something which never fails her. I can't honestly say whether her lips moved, as I wasn't paying them much attention. Almost immediately, you completely forget she's doing all the work on stage, such is the skill with which she projects lunatic personalities onto others. Taking a break from simply enjoying the show, what struck me was the way she reacts, with laughter, amazement, shock and horror to what everyone else is "saying". It's such a clever trick that you end up applauding her willing victims, who are clearly having as much fun on stage as we are having watching them. Less successful was a speed dating interlude, where audience members were allowed their own voice, uneasily chatting with an unnervingly large incarnation of Monkey. No one seemed to know quite what to say, including Nina Conti, and one fellow got a little too feely, touchy. She handled the episode deftly, and I'm sure he simply forgot it was actually her in the costume, but the concept is probably best filed under interesting experiment.
 
On the previous occasions I've seen her, at festivals and at Edinburgh, the act has rarely gone beyond an hour. I did wonder whether a longer show might drag. As it turned out, when the evening came to a close, I wondered why she was finishing early, only to glance at my watch and see that she had actually overrun her allotted time. Such was the pace and energy of the show it had zipped along, over far too soon for an audience hungry to see more, disbelieving that the fun was all over. They do say leaving your audience wanting more is the sign of a great show – on that basis Nina Conti definitely delivered.