Nobody ever listens to what put-upon mums have to say, says Esther Manito, and she’s here to put that right with a touring show, Slagbomb, about the harried domestic life of an Essex fortysomething. With a husband who never listens, a hormonal daughter and a son refusing to grant her – even when she’s on the loo – a moment’s peace, Manito is reporting back from the frontline of unglamorous family life. And she fashions from it effective standup too, even if it starts to feels one-note, and resists our host’s efforts, never very convincing, to shape it into more than the sum of its parts.
Those parts can be effective as stand-alone routines. There’s a reliably amusing number about her infant son leaving her exposed in the toilet of a Mexican restaurant. There’s a bit about easyJet’s baggage restrictions that makes up for in ardour and comic exaggeration what it lacks in originality. There are also first-base routines, like the one about sex education in the 90s, and weak punchlines, like the “space cakes” line wrapping up a section on her kids’ dressing-up days at school. I also found Manito’s scornful persona a bit two-dimensional, at least in the show’s first half, where everything is “the next load of bollocks” – like her holiday to Skegness, where “it’s windy, it’s raining, and it’s shit”.
It’s a relief when we start glimpsing other sides to her, as when she sheds tears at a waxing session, or – a highlight, this – when the war in Gaza throws her chosen charity for the London marathon into embarrassing relief. By this stage, we’re getting a more rounded Manito (long-distance runner; daughter to a Lebanese dad fretting about the Middle East, and a mum developing a taste for medicinal cannabis) in place of the middle-aged grouch caricature. We get some vivid material, too. But it comes at you in scattershot fashion, with many an apropos-of-nothing segue and with Manito’s various stabs at making the show cohere (is it about the so-called “sandwich generation”? is it about her attempt to “improve her reputation”?) never quite coalescing.