Lou Wall: Breaking the Fifth Wall

It’s difficult to say anything about this dazzling show without spoiling what it achieves.  It is a show of non-stop twists, reversals, reveals and revelations. It takes what we are happy to believe and then whips the rug out from under us.

On the sold-out opening night, the room is packed with Lou Wall fans or people those fans have told ‘You must see this show – Lou Wall is brilliant.’  Well, they are.  Some have called Lou Wall a ‘comedy genius’ (I agree) and there can be few shows amongst the hundreds on offer at this Comedy Festival that can match the quicksilver wit and philosophical depth of Breaking the Fifth Wall.  And Wall, at 193 cm, is such a beguiling, attractive presence, restlessly, energetically moving about the tiny stage, with an innocent, bright-eyed little smile, throwing in a few dance moves, with their trademark video screen mounted behind them.

And what exactly is the ‘fifth wall’?  Another wall beyond the ‘fourth wall’?  A fifth member of the Wall family?  There is an explanation, but you have to think very fast to keep up. 

Wall plays with their audience, teasing, leading us into trap after trap – truth and lie, lie and truth.  Every comedian, indeed, every storyteller edits, embroiders and lies - and we believe it.  Wall quotes her mother (she often does, each quote beginning with ‘Louisa...’), ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.’  Wall’s Mum says she made that up – except she didn’t.  Here, each time something we choose to believe – because it’s a good story – turns out to be a lie, and we are, well, shocked, even while we’re laughing.  So, it’s not true!  Of course not!  But a second ago, it was.  We’ve been had – and we love it.

Breaking the Fifth Wall is directed by the highly intelligent and subversive Zoë Coombs-Marr, no stranger to the surprise reveal, and adding here, we suspect, an even sharper edge to the challenge Wall throws out – and making Fifth Wall even tighter and even better than Wall’s last year’s Bi-Sexuals Lament. 

In the bar and on the street outside, people are simply blown away.  We exchange halting superlatives.  But there’s a darker suspicion hovering.  The question of Truth is the central theme, and the overturning of truth is what makes Breaking the Fifth Wall so discombobulating.  So, maybe, possibly, there’s a meta-level to this show: that we might think beyond the more or less innocent, sometimes dismaying tricks of Fifth Wall and question all those confidently told lies thrown at us from websites and the media every day.

If Stage Whispers awarded stars, I’d give this show five.  Do not miss it.

Michael Brindley