Chris Cantrill: Easily Swayed review – midlife distress call goes from one big laugh to another

Twentysomethings, there is nothing here for you! So says Chris Cantrill at the start of Easily Swayed, a show highly conscious of the Yorkshireman recently having turned 40. It’s a tale of early middle-age, of a move to the countryside with his wife and son that – in tandem with that big birthday – scrambled Cantrill’s sense of himself, and of the communities he’s part of. It would, for clarity, be as easily enjoyed by twentysomethings as anyone else. One half of the raucously silly sketch duo the Delightful Sausage, Cantrill may be serious about what he’s saying, but not how he says it, and his path to identity breakdown leads us from one big, ageless laugh to another.
We’re invited to consider this as quite the epic quest, as the 40-year-old dons a cape, and dubs his childhood friendship group, whose camaraderie will be crucial, “the Fellowship”. It’s a deceptively well structured show (directed by the Delightful Sausage’s other half, Amy Gledhill), none the less so for Cantrill drawing sardonic attention to its story beats. It begins with pen-portraits of his trio of lifelong pals, and of the youth (as “an inexplicably damp twentysomething”) that Cantrill is now leaving behind. It recounts the happy dawn of his new rural life, as he cultivates an eccentric interest in medieval history.
But as he enters his fifth decade and the bucolic ideal starts to tarnish, nature’s red teeth and claws are soon tearing at our host’s sense of self. He meets someone two years younger than him who “looks like Captain Tom!” He finds himself adrift among new friends he’s not friendly with. A “Jackass-era man”, he relapses into the pranking habits of his youth – to bathetic effect. Cantrill is too much of a Yorkshireman to linger on the point, but this is a full-blown moral collapse, and the Fellowship is duly assembled to answer his (concealed) distress call. So climaxes a highly effective set, a show about male emotional articulacy disguised (as is men’s wont) as a fish-out-of-water comedy with a great relish for Cantrill’s midlife indignities.