Bill Hicks: Slight Return – Review

Imitating a legend is a dangerous thing to do – and imitating one that died young and has such a loyal and, generally, young fanbase is even more dangerous.

But Chas. Early, as Bill Hicks, and director Richard Hurst have definitely pulled it off – and how.

The show starts in spectacular fashion as the spirit of Hicks is brought back from a bright, white, blinding heaven. And despite recreating the Hicks gurning once too often during the show, Early inhabits the role well with well-observed recreations of Hicks’ physical comedy.

For the second time I have had the start of a show at the Arts Theatre spoilt by the over-loud speaker system. Is their sound engineer hard of hearing? Having such a high volume makes it difficult to feel comfortable enough to give yourself up to what is going on on-stage until you have had time to adjust to this audio onslaught. Which is a great shame as the re-born Hicks returns and flexes himself back into his “Peace and Love” and ranting life.

The jokes and the ranting seem strange coming from a man who should be dead, especially if you are already a Hicks fan, making you unsure whether to buy into it completely.

But you find that you do – and while some of the material seems to be reworked and tweaked material from Bill’s recorded shows, there is also a load of new, and current, material some of which hits the high watermark that Bill set. And it succeeds in giving Hicks a voice in 2007.

It’s this desire to hear “What Bill Hicks would say about the world today” that gets dealt with in the first two-thirds of the play – and gets done well.

But this is more than just a play about what Bill would be saying if he hadn’t died aged 32, it’s also a play about what Bill meant to his fans and to commentators, and revisits the core of Bill’s journey. It questions, with the same intellectual rigour that you feel Bill would have brought, the heroic status he has been given, and whether what we need is Hicks voice back, or if we need to find, or create, questioning new voices for ourselves.

As the show comes to an end, there is no punchline, there is no message about life being a rollercoaster, there is just one statement that sums up what Bill was saying through his comedy. It’s a poignant ending to a brilliant show.

Buy tickets – remember this is the last run of the show!