Performing On The Hottest Day Of The Year = Audience Of Just 5

Not only was it the hottest day of the year to be cooped up in a airless Hen and Chickens, those who weren't basking in the sunshine with some pimms were probably watching the wimbledon final. Poor Simon Jay, it's a shame as it was a very slick one man show. 

Imagine a live autopsy, in which the surgeon attempts to surmise what the corpse on his operating table was like when he was alive. This forms the intriguing premise of Scott Payne and Simon Jay’s one-man show, Is He A Bit Simon Jay? , in which the actor Simon Jay comically adopts an array of different guises and personalities, each one revealing a little more about his fictional namesake than the last. 

Given that the title of the show sounds like cockney rhyming slang for ‘gay’, I thought the piece would centre on homosexuality, but I was wrong. The titular character is absent throughout: consequently, as an audience, we have to piece together what Simon Jay was like as a person, based on those that knew him when he was alive. The show explores the idea that Simon Jay is the product of those that surrounded him. 

Sometimes in sketch comedy, when one actor plays so many parts, the piece can get confusing as all the personalities begin to blur into one. The same can’t be said for Is He A Bit Simon Jay?: each time Simon Jay becomes a new character, his voice and physicality change completely. His chain-smoking, jailbird mother could never be mistaken for his ‘jolly-hockey-sticks’ wife. Simon Jay plays over 20 characters within 60 minutes, my favourite being a man whom he knew from the pub, called Pete. Pete is the antithesis of the meek Simon Jay, a loud cockney who enjoys telling elaborate stories, which Pete explains are “not lies, just him making truths”. I was thoroughly impressed by Simon Jay’s character acting, as it is no mean feat to be able to flit between such a plethora of characters so seamlessly. 

Having been performed at a few scratch nights, Is He A Bit Simon Jay? is continuing its development by touring fringe venues, with the aim of performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014. The only character that needs tweaking is the woman Simon Jay sleeps with after his own stag night, as her accent sounds too generically foreign — as a whole, her persona isn’t on par with the others. The ending of the piece is also a little rushed. That said, if  the piece is already this strong and funny during its development stages, I can’t wait to see how it evolves. Is He A Bit Simon Jay?  is theatrically schizophrenic, but all in all it is sketch comedy at its finest.