Please note – this review contains adult themes.
This is a show which, for once, tells you exactly what it is in the title. Most comics do jokes about sex; few attempt what actor and storyteller Peter Searles does: a full-on account of his entire sexual experiences from start to, well, not very recently (This is after all a show he premiered in 2005.).
It begins with his being pressured into w***ing off a prefect at boarding school, aged 9, and culminates in mind-blowing tantric sex with a Hollywood starlet some considerable time later.
But this is in no way a load of male braggadocio about his ‘conquests’. Far from it.
It is far more about his disappointments in love; his humiliations and defeats, and his bewilderment at his occasional successes.
And very funny: whether in the usual nerve-racking teenage fumblings; or in his involvement with a self- help guru’s video advice on how to expunge negative thinking; in a riotously hilarious episode where a bored Welsh woman in a seedy massage parlour gives him a hand job, while smoking and complaining about her life; and not, of course, to leave out the extended account of the Hollywood rumpy-pumpy.
All this and more is told in no-holds-barred graphic detail, with an actor’s command of timing and characterisation, but always with his eye unerringly on the comic, and it has the audience in stitches.
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Reviewer: John Christopher Wood | Star rating: ****
Peter Searles performed at the Ring O’Bells in Widcombe, Bath on Wednesday 3rd April 2019.
