Like a Late Night Chat with a Stranger

“Birds may do it and bees may do it, but falling in love isn’t so easy for people.  Bob Karper, for instance, hasn’t fallen in love in more than five years.  Is there something wrong with him?  He looks back over his life at his first love, at his divorce, at his mother’s divorce, at his Spanish friend Luis, who hasn’t been in love since he kissed Arantxa in the disco when he was a boy.  He opens the question to the floor, inviting the audience to stamp their feet if they are in love.  Depressingly few people do.

Autobiographical one-man shows are a dangerous business: the performer can all to easily seem self-indulgent.  Karper’s show, however, feels like a late-night chat with a stranger in a bar.  He is a wistful yet unsentimental storyteller with a beguiling and idiosyncratic style.  He delivers most of his show from a piano, accompanying his tales with jazzy melodies that ripple and growl to suit each character.  Behind him, slides flash up on the wall: embarrassing childhood photographs, his mother with her third husband, whom she met 10 years after she announced she was through with love.  It all adds up to an engagingly intimate portrait of relationships that makes love seem a more complicated business than ever.”

— Maddy Costa, The Guardian