list.co.uk/festival Adam Riches | FESTIVAL COMEDY
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With his fi rst full show since winning the 2011 Edinburgh Comedy Award,
Adam Riches is promising more heavy interaction and in-your-face audience participation. Brian Donaldson will be sitting in the back row
‘I was too tall to be Tigger, and I couldn’t be Goofy, so I was a waiter.’ Adam Riches is recalling his time as a 19-year-old working at Disneyland Paris. This part of our story doesn’t have a happy-ever-after: Riches was i red for being a little bit too cheeky. ‘I hadn’t really worked out what I was going to do beyond that time but any kind of performance elements that I had just manifested themselves in me being a bit of a dick. And so I was constantly messing around; my parents weren’t there, it was a foreign country, I was 19. It was an amazing place with amazing people coming from all over the world. They all hated each other but they all combined to hate me. Yeah, I got i red for being a bit of a douche.’
Adam Riches has pretty much got where he is today by continuing to be a douche. Or, more accurately, playing a series of douches on stage. From his i rst Fringe show in 2006, he has built a reputation as a fearless performer of sketch comedy with an unusually high level of audience participation.
His antics have featured Swingball and skateboards, while willing(ish) volunteers have thrown him across the stage (he was ‘being’ Daniel Day-Lewis at this point) and had a probiotic dairy product licked off their faces. This last pursuit got him into a right old pickle, when one
victim took exception to Riches’ advances in the guise of Victor Legit, an alpha male enforcer for the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT). ‘At a couple of late-night gigs in London, I’ve had a couple of blokes react really badly to it and one of them had me by the throat and up against a wall. Of course, I’m still Victor, so I can’t back down from that. But really, how angry can you be in life if someone licking Yakult from your face is your trigger?’ Victor was a staple character in those early Fringe shows, but his creator cast him asunder for Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches, an hour which earned him the Edinburgh Comedy Award. ‘I cut him from the 2011 show because the spirit of that one was chaos and smiles. Even in the disgusting or pushier bits, all the characters are very much with you in doing it, whereas with Victor, I take one step back from the audience.’
The good news for Victor Legit fans is that he is back this year for Adam of the Riches, albeit older if not exactly wiser. ‘He has to have moved on a bit but I also have to introduce him again because most people won’t have seen him. I think there might be a physical change which will hopefully negate the aggressiveness and highlight his stupidity.’ Of course, with such a high level of in-your-face physicality going on within the room, there’s always a risk that things might go awry; and not just with the testosterone-fuelled reaction of some touchy punters. Riches earned himself a place in Fringe folklore with his 2008 show, when a tussle with a seemingly genuine member of the audience (it was a set-up involving his actor brother) went horribly wrong, and Riches was left in agony on the l oor while an ambulance was called.
31 Jul–7 Aug 2014 THE LIST FESTIVAL 29
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