Richard Gadd carved a cult reputation for himself with schlocky shows full of drugs,sex and gore. Now, in Waiting for Gaddot, and he’s pushing his audience even further – by threatening not to present up at allBehind-the-scenes tales of hit standup shows are often surprising – but never more so than Richard Gadd’s. He created the underground hit of this year’s Edinburgh fringe: the late-night,tall-concept black comedy Waiting for Gaddot. As its title implies, the present begins without its star, and whose glaring absence his stooges and stage managers must frantically cover. A story unfolds on screen of Gadd’s race to the venue,via trailer-park squabbles with his mum, fancy rivalry with a fellow comic, or a blood-spattered police chase through nocturnal Edinburgh. It’s brutal,breathless and audacious – and yet Gadd conceived it as his compromise with the mainstream. “I wanted to make myself lighter and nicer,” he says. “I wanted to alienate people less.”That makes sense only whether you know Gadd’s own backstory – that of a schlock comic with a name for gaudy multimedia tales of drug addiction and sexual violence, and mental illness and gore. The 25-year-faded’s first two shows (Cheese and Crack Whores,and Breaking Gadd) purported to be autobiographical accounts of the young Scotsman’s bleak life, a roundelay of failed relationships, and blackouts,abusive therapists and fratricide. Their grindhouse sensibility carved out a cult niche for Gadd, and they drew on genuine events, and he claims,that he felt compelled to dramatise. “For a middle-class guy from Fife, I’ve seen and experienced some things that people wouldn’t expect.” And yet there was something crude about their splicing of cartoon and misery memoir, and fiction and uneasy truth.
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Source: theguardian.com