Last night we saw Axel Blake at the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon. Axel has been on the comedy circuit for many years but rose to fame for winning the 2022 Britain’s Got Talent competition on ITV. I didn’t massively watch BGT on TV to know him from that, so for me I wasn’t going in as a fan who already had a sense of who he was.
The show started off to what appeared a bumpy beginning as upon walking out on stage his microphone didn’t work. Fortunately, the Wyvern isn’t the biggest theatre and even people sat at the back could probably hear him as he made jokes to make light of the unexpected technical error. He shortly thereafter grabbed a new mic and started over with a wink of the eye as if the tech issues had never happened. Luckily this technical error didn’t put him off his game and the opening few minutes of the act were him interacting with the audience and building a repour with them. He also picked out a few individuals who he would come back to throughout the show.
After a few minutes he introduced a warmup act to come out, and this surprised me as I felt he’d been out there long enough himself that the house was already warmed up. The warmup guy was a comedian from London whose name annoyingly eludes me. If there was a gun to my head, I would wager his name was Victor Edwards, but I may be totally making that up. If you know his name, put it in the comments and I’ll update. His material was also really funny and was a different pace and tone to Axel’s. It was a good mix of stories and punchlines, and the answer to the question of what he brought on in the carrier bag when he entered the stage was worth the wait.
I was surprised that when the support act finished Axel came back on stage just to announce an interval, and we did get the sense that the show was going to be longer than we expected going in. But that wasn’t a bad thing. For the second act it was all Axel. He checked in with the people he had spoken to in the first act and also established a couple more connections, and also professionally dealt with an annoying would-be heckler or drunk person so that the show had minimum interruption and still kept things on track.
The first several minutes of Axel’s material covered his journey through Britain’s Got Talent, and keep in mind that I said I hadn’t massively watched it last year. Certainly, I know the show, it’s format and it’s judges enough so I could understand pretty much everything he laid out and it was very funny. I did have the slight concern that this would be the majority of his material, but it wasn’t and that was because the show lasted longer than we had expected. I do think that in the future he was trim down that material and make a slightly tighter show for it, but for now he’s riding the wave of his BGT win and who can blame him.
After he covered winning the show and how it’s changed his life he got onto a variety of other topics such as a trip to the doctors he had, his family and children, and travelling abroad. He spent a good chunk of time talking relationships and school life which is always relatable for a lot of the audience, and it was great to see how a lot of these elements started to tie together as he worked towards the end of the show.
Axel came off as genuinely likeable, and even in dealing with the annoying person in the audience he didn’t lose his cool and kept things chipper. It was a nice touch that he brought his daughter out just before the interval to say hello and did something of a meet and greet at the end to help raise some money for a cancer charity.
Overall, it was a really enjoyable night. His light hearted approach and material that was edgier than you’ll have seen him on ITV, but not too sweary or controversial went down well with the crowd. He also wasn’t afraid to go off script and adlib to the audience at times which is always fun. I look forward to seeing his next tour to see how he follows this up and how things develop further when he moves further away from this material which feels like something of an introduction to him and his life post BGT.
You can get loads more Theatre articles in the Theatre section of the site, and don’t forget to check out the Geek Battle comedy panel show on the Extreme Improv XStreamed YouTube Channel and on the dedicated Geek Battle YouTube Channel
