New Theatre, Oxford

Where do you go after 32 years as one of Britain’s best-loved comedians? Give the people what they want, and risk losing interest? Or do what interests you, and risk losing the people? To his credit, Lenny Henry doesn’t stand still. He sheds old characters when they’ve said their piece. His last live show, So Much Things to Say, in 2003, was a heartfelt and admirably ambitious collection of linked character pieces, pitched somewhere between comedy and theatre.

His new show is called Where You from? — an apt title for a show that roots around without quite finding an identity. Henry swaps between stand-up and character comedy, reprising the previous show’s protagonists. But in mixing the formats he fractures his momentum, offering us a series of starters and no main course. And he looks surprisingly uncomfortable in the stand-up segments. He works the first couple of rows with a quick wit but no evident pleasure — he looks as if he’d like to be wearing rubber gloves for the job. What’s more, once he’s warmed them up, the crowd scarcely figure again in a two-hour show that’s been honed by a team of three co-writers and a director.

It could be that, gifted a comic though he is, Henry doesn’t entirely trust his audience. He’s brilliant at inhabiting the roles of Lister, a shopkeeper in Harlesden, his fruity wife, Rachel, and soldier son, Daniel. A closing barrage of jokes from each of them reminds us just how good a joke-teller Henry is, too, when he gives himself permission to let rip.

But, since his cast have to share the stage with Lenny the stand-up, they don’t have time to take shape as fully as they did last time. He’s prone to forcing their hands with off-the-peg gags or comic staples — such as a priest fainting at the sight of Rachel hunting for a communion wafer in her big breasts. Daniel’s antiIraq war stuff is meant sincerely but hasn’t time to do more than tick the box.

The topics he addresses in his stand-up are personal — his first job as a welder; the trials of sex after more than 20 years with his wife — “you know, Dawn French off the telly”; the indignities of touring as part of the Black and White Minstrel show in the late Seventies. But, though he pounds out his material, he holds back on going too deep. So Seventies racism is gleaned for a few minutes of material when it could sustain so much more. And, though the marriage material is the most fully realised here, you feel as if another comic could perform it too.

Such slickness means that the show never gets bogged down and, to be fair, it gets a lot of laughs from the Saturday-night crowd. But the profusion of ideas makes me feel as if Henry is in a no man’s land between crowd-pleasing and self-expression. He is a brilliant character comic, no question. But when he’s playing himself it can be hard to know where Lenny Henry is coming from.

Touring www.lennyhenry.com

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