Having headlined the Camden People’s Theatre’s week-long festival ‘Beyond the Joke’ this January, Rachel Mars’ solo show ‘The Way You Tell Them’ comes at an interesting moment when the worlds of theatre and stand-up are increasingly colliding. A self-titled rookie stand-up and popular on the festival circuit, Mars is an English and Theatre Studies graduate of the University of Leeds. This, which sees Mars return to her theatrical routes at the Workshop Theatre, was a showstopping performance, described by the Guardian as “a love letter to comedy by someone who wants it to mean something.” A show about joke-telling that is not always funny, Mars hilariously yet thought-provokingly questions how we use and abuse comedy.

I was sold from the off: Paul Simon’s joyful anthem Call Me Al serenaded Mars as she bounded onto stage, greeting the audience in a style which initially seemed like a stand-up piece. With a captivatingly energetic stage presence, what unravelled was an eclectic mix of material that did more than merely tell jokes, as she told the story of her personal love affair with comedy and her constant compulsion to be funny even in, or perhaps especially in the most serious of situations.

The stage was split into three: a stand-up style mic, a stage block framed with the red curtain of traditional theatre, and a comfy armchair, which allowed her to traverse across and express her own identities as performer, comic and ultimately, a person. She told one-liners under the spotlight dressed in a wolf onesie as well as the tragic stories of her family’s history in the holocaust, and performed a moving instrumental physical sequence with a red LED light. This involved her hypnotically casting the light across a pair of lungs which were drawn onto her t-shirt, representative of how the joke is as big a part of her life as breathing is.

As a vulnerably autobiographical performance, Mars describes how this year at the annual Jewish festival of atonement, Yom Kippur, she noticed for the first time an item on the list of 24 things which are apologised for throughout the day: “We have clowned around, we have ridiculed good people, we have made a joke of things so we can never really repent because we never take anything seriously enough.” Spoken as a kind of mantra throughout the performance, this epitomised Mars’ challenge about the role of comedy in today’s society – is it something we need to be sorry for?

This question was most chillingly asked as a clip about the only survivor of an AIDS drug test was played through two times. The first time might have moved the audience to tears of sympathy. The second, however, induced tears of hysterical and uncomfortably guilty laughter, as farts were played over the top of the man’s devastating speech. This is Mars’ inquiry at its most genius, as the audience are experientially confronted with how laughter can function.

When I asked her if she worried about the reception of this controversial experiment, she said plainly “I don’t care”. Unafraid to push boundaries, her goal is to spur thinking rather than just generate laughs. After all, as she says in the introduction to the show, she could put on a Micahel McIntyre DVD and we could all have a right giggle. This is not to knock popular stand-up, but to interrogate contemporary society’s obsession with comedy.
Whether or not we like it, laugher is essential to human communication, as we are hauntingly reminded by Oppenheimer’s description of the reactions of the first atom bomb test, that is played during the performance: ‘a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.’ Heart-warmingly, movingly and ultimately, hilariously, Mars weighs up the real life implications of the things we joke about to do a pretty good job of promoting the importance of laughter – when all else fails, you can always tell a joke.

Lottie Webb