Erin Harrington reviews Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen, written by Marcelo Dos Santos, directed by Tim Bain, at the Court Theatre, Saturday 14 March 2026.
The one-man show Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen is a one act black comedy framed as a stand-up set that’s really a convoluted shaggy dog story, or maybe a nervous breakdown, or perhaps just one big fat joke on the audience. Our narrator, played deftly by Trubie-Dylan Smith, is a queer, mid-level jobbing comedian based in London. He spends his nights hopping from club to club, turning dispiriting Grindr hook ups into comic bits, and milking his insecurities for laughs while his more confident, more attractive colleagues are booking TV gigs. He’s a self-loathing hypochondriac with a taste for self-sabotage, unable to believe he deserves something good. In Smith’s very capable hands, he’s also cherubic and lovable, dishing out stories of grody coke-fuelled debasement with charm and lightness.
Through the dreaded app he meets and starts dating an earnest American man who is nice, calm, caring and smoking hot – a unicorn. The catch: the American suffers from cataplexy. If he laughs, his head will fall off and he’ll die, like an oddball retelling of ‘The Green Ribbon’. The dread of the show’s title plays out through the narrator’s fears about intimacy, kindness and vulnerability – the pain of being truly seen – alongside the audience’s growing fears that it’s all going to end in disaster. But, with 70 minutes of jokes.
The success of this show rests on Smith’s terrific performance, and the way he and director Tim Bain have broken down writer Marcelo Dos Santos’s massive script for this Aotearoa New Zealand premiere. Smith is a world-class improviser with endless charisma. This work also feels like it’s in conversation with Smith’s similarly demanding solo performance in Every Brilliant Thing at the Court in 2024 – although that was definitely far more wholesome. Here, he fully embodies the character, wandering around the stage, mic in hand, cajoling, shocking and entertaining the audience. He’s able to lead us through some emotionally challenging material, especially as the character hits rock bottom. The show feels most lived in when Smith drifts off script a little, responding to the room, inhabiting the gaps in the text, and bringing us through the onion layers of the story with a light touch. I’m keen to revisit it at the end of the season to see how it’s developed. The work’s shifts in register are supported by Giles Tanner’s lighting, operated by stage manager Haydon Dickie, which pulls us between the club stage and more subjective, interior spaces.
This very meta setup also uses the language of comedy to poke away at the relationship between the performer and the audience. The Wakefield Family Front Room at the Court Theatre is set up like a comedy club, complete with cabaret seating for those that get in early – an inspired layout that addresses some of the room’s idiosyncrasies while building a warm, comfortable sense of environment. This is an important choice, for as well as being a cracking yarn, Feeling Afraid is asking questions about the ‘confessional’ form of stand up and its manufactured sense of intimacy and authenticity – the contradiction at the heart of much comedy. Are we incentivising people to exploit their pain for laughs in a form of quasi-consensual degradation? What sort of third act epiphany do we demand narratively from this therapeutic purging? How might a performer manipulate their own voice, body language and timing to make us feel things we don’t want to feel? How much can we trust the performer to tell the truth – and do they even owe us anything?
At the beginning of the show, Smith off-handedly describes himself as an unreliable narrator. He demonstrates how skilful he is at using the patterns of comedy to set things up and then twist the blade. He’s like a magician flashing the rabbit and the hat. It’s a bit, see? Audiences will need to head along themselves to be first drawn into the story, then to see what the trick is and admire how well it is done.
Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen runs until Thursday 2 April.
Flat City Field Notes 