Dillie Keane performed her solo show at the Wycombe Swan. Picture: Steve Ullathorne
Dillie Keane performed her solo show at the Wycombe Swan, High Wycombe and continues to tour until 24 March.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Dillie Keane’s solo tour gives Fascinating Aïda fans a chance to indulge in some satirical wit while her co-writer Adèle Anderson recovers from illness and Liza Pulman treads the boards elsewhere.
Keane’s solo venture, the first for more years than she probably cares to remember, concludes its tour at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester on 24 March.
As the singer and actress says, the songs that she writes with Anderson are a therapy and usually based on specific experiences, providing an autobiographical journey through her life, loves and losses. The satirical nature of them injects an acidity that is an acutely accurate interpretation of female observation, primarily against the opposite sex, but interjected with the occasional poignancy of a love song or emotional memory.
Keane’s first song about waking in an unfamiliar bed is a great opener to the show, setting a high benchmark which she maintains throughout. As a trained actress, satirist and musician, she professionally holds the stage for nearly two hours and runs through subjects such as internet dating, married men and sexual liaisons.
She’s a great storyteller too, intermittently breaking from singing to telling three very different but equally funny stories about fortune tellers. She also cleverly builds the humour, knocks it back again to tell an incredibly sad tale about her best friend, then rouses the audience into fits of laughter again with her acerbic wit.
Accompanied on the piano by Michael Roulston with whom she shares a duet about lesbianism to great comic effect, Keane’s solo tour is a tempting pre-cursor to a promised and much-anticipated Fascinating Aïda reunion tour in 2017.
Julie Watterston
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