Review: Laugh or You’ll Cry at Northern Stage

“…really resonated with the audience… huge respect for Lisa and her warm, empathetic approach…”

Laugh or You’ll Cry by Lisa Bean, Northern Stage

By Kay Wilson

I’ll confess I didn’t really know what to expect from Lisa Bean’s show, as it was billed as a night out for entrepreneurs with stand-up comedy. As I’ve run my own business and tried out stand-up I was intrigued to see how she would tie it all together.

Her show had its first performance at Northern Stage last night and the audience was full of Lisa Bean enthusiasts – and her friends and family – which really added to the humour. One of the funniest running jokes was that her wife was actually late for the start of it.

Lisa bounded onto the stage with bags of energy and charisma. She talked about her outfit, which was smart silk shirt, waistcoat and trousers and the various knickers that would work with it. So far, so stand-up. Her look and vocal style was like a posh Northern Ellen DeGeneres. Right from the start she moved about the stage like a comedian, getting audience participation going, which helped create a warm, inclusive atmosphere. In fact, she was able to  name-check quite a few people in the audience who she obviously knew well. There was palpable affection for her at every turn, with plenty of supportive clapping and whooping when required.

The content of her show, two hours long with a short interval, took us on a journey from her birth, which resulted in an arm birth defect and into childhood with a military upbringing, travelling often to new schools. She then did a funny pull-back reveal to illustrate how she went to boarding school at 11 to avoid being educated in different places. The location was Dover. Quite a way from the family home in Catterick Garrison.

Following school she talked about entering corporate life on a financial services graduate scheme and then building her own marketing business. The challenges of doing this in 2008 with the financial crash were outlined in candid detail including the regular conversations with her business bank manager about handling her overdraft. This re-enactment of the phone call was entertaining and worked well.

For stand-up aficionados there were two gags that landed well for me. A joke about her Dad being Mr Bean and a second one from her first day at the office as a graduate trainee which I won’t share in case it spoils it for anyone seeing her next show in Leeds.

In the second half Lisa talked more about entrepreneurship and her ambitions to be a major league coach on the circuit, like Mel Robbins. She riffed about working out how research, for her recent Master’s degree, sought to identify what made entrepreneurs successful. The answer, she found, was in part to have peer support to reassure you when you wobbled about elements of running your business.

Lisa also talked about her own desire to talk to a theatre full of people, there to listen to her journey and coaching programmes. There was an option with the ticket to have a VIP experience and there seemed to be a good take-up of that with lanyards and interval wine aplenty.

Her talk and take on being a woman, in particular, in business obviously really resonated with much of the mainly female audience. They felt seen and you could sense they had huge respect for Lisa and her warm, empathetic approach.

I’m not quite sure how to define, with precision, what this show was as it was quite a mix. But my best shot is to say it was a bit of autobiography, career advice for self-employed businesswomen, encouragement and practical advice for the dare-to-dreamers amongst us.

Laugh or You’ll Cry plays at Northern Stage on Thursday 05 February.

Kay Wilson is a North East-based writer. She won Runner-Up in the Self-Published category at the Comedy Women in Print awards for her debut novel, The Stand-Up Mam. It was inspired by her own experience of performing comedy for two years and charts the adventures of a perfect mother who does stand-up. It transforms her but blows up family life. Described as ‘hilarious and heart-warming’, signed copies can be bought at The Bound bookshop, Whitley Bay. The novel is also available on Amazon here. Kay has a website which promotes extraordinary women and gives updates on her writing life.