Re:Birth

Russell Brand spends much of this hour looking at footage of himself on a giant screen and cringing. It is a necessary exercise. After half a decade spent attempting to spark a global revolution from his kitchen, a period that culminated in highly publicized media clashes and a YouTube channel that alienated much of his mainstream audience, he returns to the stage with a daughter, a mortgage, and a desperate need to explain how he got here.

Filmed at the Hackney Empire in East London in April 2018, the set is structured around the birth of his first child and the sudden, humbling transition into suburban domesticity. Brand uses his newfound status as a father to contextualize his past excesses. The funniest routine of the night is a self-effacing post-mortem of his activist phase, specifically a story about visiting an underpaid NHS worker to discuss poverty, only to leave her house with a gift of food she could barely afford, loaded into the back of his chauffeur-driven limousine.

Between theatrical descriptions of childbirth, he breaks up the grandstanding by wandering into the crowd to read embarrassing audience questionnaires, physically climbing over theater seats and sitting on the laps of startled ticket holders.