Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen – Reviews

"I adored this 2022 monologue about what it is to be funny and what it takes to be loved when I first saw it at the Edinburgh Fringe. Its transfer here, still starring the magnificent Samuel Barnett, reveals once more what a fine work it is. Like Backstairs Billy it is full of humour, lines written with the whiplash timing of a master."

"Under the sharp and fluid direction of Matthew Xia, Barnett dances gracefully through the cleverness. There are wonderful scenes"

"The writing is pin sharp, but what Barnett brings to it is an undertow of almost terrifying feeling. It’s a performance of enormous grace and subtlety, funny enough to represent a talented stand-up, but increasingly letting the uncertainty and fear reveal itself beneath the clown’s face."

"Fast, filthy and powerful"

"Former History Boy Samuel Barnett never puts a foot wrong in this short but perfectly formed monologue"

"A barnstorming performance by Samuel Barnett as a self-loathing gay stand-up mining his life for material illuminates Marcelo Dos Santos’s short but perfectly formed monologue."

"It's staged with hectic precision by director Matthew Xia as if the character – known only as The Comedian – were trying out a new routine on us in a red-draped club, occasionally changing a detail or a character name to make things funnier or more tragic."

"Dos Santos is having a moment: his play about the Queen Mother and her gay servant Backstairs Billy has just opened at the Duke of York’s with a starry cast and director. But where that frothy, full-length comedy fizzles out, this miniature is elegantly succinct and powerful, and Barnett never puts a foot wrong. Like the hookups his character wittily describes, it’s fast, filthy and surprisingly revealing."

"Sex, death and comedy in this ingenious monologue"

"Samuel Barnett is a revelation as an agonisingly self-aware thirtysomething in Marcelo Dos Santos’s expertly crafted single-hander"

"Feeling Afraid is part deconstruction of the art of comedy, part wincing snapshot of a millennial generation so blighted by self-consciousness that every gesture, thought and facial expression is accompanied by a self-ironising deflection."

"Dos Santos doesn’t reference them directly, but there’s something of John Osborne’s The Entertainer and Trevor Griffiths’s unsung 1975 play The Comedians in the way his monologue skewers the existential loneliness and death-plagued terrors of the stand-up clown."

"Barnett – an original History Boy on stage and screen – is a revelation here, delivering each line and pause and confiding aside to the audience with such lived-in ease, you would be forgiven for assuming the monologue is autobiographical."