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“An exciting departure from [his] previous work,” claims the publicity for Simon Amstell’s new standup show – but it’s a claim that proves hard to substantiate. Like any Amstell set, I Love It Here is self-analytical to an absurd degree – and this level of forensic solipsism, from this clever and funny a man, can’t help but be engaging. But departure it is not – and indeed, I found it frustrating how Amstell’s concerns have not moved on a jot in a show largely about his disappointment (“pain”, he would call it) that his crush on a famous singer isn’t reciprocated.
The abiding impression, of a show set at a star-studded Hollywood party, is of an artist whose life (and creative output) might benefit from a little more friction. We encounter Amstell at the start of this set blissful with his partner of 14 years, increasingly at ease with himself after overcoming shame. But an invitation to a Tinseltown bash, where his erstwhile teenage crush will be in attendance, brings out Simon’s wounded inner child. And so we’re pitched into a long anecdote in which fretful Amstell butterflies around with Baz Luhrmann, Viola Davis and Charli xcx, seeking to absolve his childhood agonies by coupling up with an unnamed pop hunk.
Your delight in this shaggy dog story may depend on your tolerance for name-dropping, and for Amstell (a famous man for more than two decades) casting himself as a fish out of water in such company. It also requires you to invest in the supposed high stakes of Amstell’s pursuit of his celeb crush – and many in the audience do, greeting each unreturned text message (once Amstell has returned home to the UK) with an indulgent “aaww”. I couldn’t join them. For me, the show doesn’t do the work of justifying why this all matters so much to a now-contented 45-year-old man.
Perhaps it’s enough that this is Amstell, and we must take his fragility and neediness as read. His is after all one of comedy’s most compelling personae these past few years, and continues to be funny here, moment to moment. There’s an amusing section on Mel Robbins’ self-help book The Let Them Theory, and how easily Amstell might have written it himself. One droll running joke finds him showering the world’s villains with forgiveness. Another worries away at his dwindling household-name status: “How are you supposed to keep a career going when new people keep being born?”
Does that sound like an exciting departure from his previous work? It isn’t: it’s a show that sits squarely in the territory, where therapy, spirituality and neurosis meet, that Amstell has made his own, and is often as wonderfully funny and obsessively self-reflexive as we expect from him. But it made me crave an actual departure, something more substantial for Amstell to grapple with. “I try to remember,” he says at one point, amid all the crushing and flirting, “I’m not a desperate 17-year-old any more” – and the show makes you wish he’d tried a little harder.
