Anyone lucky enough to catch stand-up superstar Dara O Briain on his last Australian tour in 2017 will know that the Irish comic treated audiences to a powerhouse ‘best of’ performance. This time round, however, he’s back to the grind.
“It was really fun to do that special edition last time, especially in terms of bringing stuff back,” he says of his 2017 tour. “I think I did all my Australian animal bits from over the years, because I just had to bring them home, you know? ‘Here’s my koala routine! Here’s my bit about Kangaroo Island!’ Literally just doing them because I was back in Australia.
“But this new show is built in a way of a proper show. In a way where stuff happens and you might not get what I’m going on about for a bit but then it pays off in a really satisfying way an hour later.”
The show in question is Voice Of Reason, which O Briain first started performing in early 2018.
“The intention was to scale it back,” he laughs of what has now become his longest tour. “Normally we do around 150 on a tour, and it’s awesome but then family and all that, you know, I can’t just be dragging myself around the world all the time. I thought, ‘I can’t do this lifestyle this much, why don’t we just do 120?’ But the shows that are booked in now, this’ll bring us up to 180.
“The international part of it has just grown and grown and grown, and now I’m doing Scandinavia, New Zealand, America – I’m doing Brisbane for the first time in 18 years. It’s become this whole thing, and I can’t turn them down! I go, ‘Oh God, this is a lot… Brisbane? I’d love to do Brisbane! Let’s add Brisbane!’ There’s all the spots I have to do, but then people keep dangling these places like, ‘Let’s go to Estonia! Have you played Helsinki yet?’ and I just get too excited about it.”
The Mock The Week presenter also says that making his set work around the world is not nearly as hard as you may think.
“Bizarrely, it’s hardest going from Ireland to the UK and back to Ireland with it. The first 120 or 130 shows were just in the UK and Ireland, and that going between the two countries was so sufficiently different, that the show has become very general as a result.
“I always start in Ireland, and it’s always very Irish when I begin. You know, talking about Irish things and Irish politics and stuff, but the minute I go to Britain all that stuff has to get dumped.
“Oddly, that’s the filter that sweeps out all the local stuff,” O Briain continues. “By the time you’re gigging around Europe you’ve narrowed it down to the universal stuff. Probably, that’s what it should have been in the first place anyway. So, by the time it comes to Australia, if it’s worked in Tromso in northern Norway and it’s worked in Cologne in western Germany, it’s going to be grand.”
O Briain says that the opportunity to bring brand new material abroad is always an exciting one – especially to Australia.
“Last time I was there it was more kind of, ‘I haven’t been here for 16 years, here’s everything!’ I think in Melbourne I did about two-and-a-half hours just going, ‘Oh and this and this and this!’ And all the reviews were really lovely, but one critic very astutely pointed out that it ‘wasn’t a proper show’, and I thought, ‘Maybe you have a point.’
“So, this show has all that fucking around in the first half where I talk with the audience and all that, but then you’ll feel the accelerator press down and everything builds up and up and up.”
In fact, a moment in Perth from the last tour has made its way into infamy via Voice Of Reason, and O Briain can barely contain himself about it.
“There’s a real joyous moment when you get excited about something you know is going to work,” O Briain says. “And you are so confident in the bit or the story – and you really shouldn’t do this – but you say, ‘Look, the thing I’m going to tell you is fucking great. It’s really good, and you’re really going to enjoy it. I can’t actually fuck it up by telling you how good it’s going to be, it’s that good.’
“Normally you have to be so aware of the energy and the tension and trying not to break it. It can be so finicky and delicate, but you get so excited and go, ‘Fuck it! I’m gonna tell you this now, because it is balls-out great.’ So yeah, I’m already looking forward to telling you what happened in Perth.”
