the magnificent stand-up comic Lenny Henry played one sell-out night in Brisbane, last night. The old lovable energetic craziness is still there, as you can see in his appearance on Australian Rove's tv interview.


However I was very impressed with what I take to be a new element in his work, a cunning structural organisation that turns the two hours into a singular resonating experience. That and a growing confidence to address life's bigger issues in his comedy; birth and death and everything in between are here. He does a sequence of character monologues, which interconnect, though you don't realise that at first. In one of these he plays one of his regular cast patrolling the edge of a minefield in Iraq, and he pulls it off perfectly. Lenny reads the comics, and somehow I've managed to miss making his aquaintance over the last twenty five years. We put that right at last night when the hotel restaurant stayed open and we sat around for an hour and a half. He's in New Zealand now, look for him there. I think it's Christchurch 25th , New Plymouth 26th.