This show had a lot of buzz around it, coming out of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and as it transferred to London, it lives up to the hype. God’s Favourite is ambitious, structurally and thematically and emotionally, and it successfully hits its complicated targets.
This show is immersive, with the lighting, costumes, and sound effects all adjusting the mood in the room to fit the narrative beats. Boxall has done an excellent job of curating the atmosphere so the audience isn’t just listening to the story, we’re experiencing it. During the scary parts, being in the room feels scary. The same applies to the joyous parts, the manic parts, the desperate parts. Boxall shares what it’s like to feel the symptoms of a frequently maligned and misunderstood psychological condition, and they do this by showing as much as by telling.
The show is built around the story of one night in Boxall’s life, though it skips around to previous years that give relevant context, making us understand more and more how significant and awful that night was. Early in the hour the storytelling is fairly linear; as it goes along, it gets increasingly confusing – though never quite to the point where can’t follow it at all – to give the audience a taste of what it’s like to have past and present muddied together while in the throes of a mental health crisis. I was sometimes so caught up that I hardly noticed the escalation in intensity, until we’d reach a calmer point in the narrative and the frantic energy would fall away.
Boxall throws around jokes about comparatively lighter topics, internet nerd-type humour, stuff about family and the comedy industry and queerness and the hobby of LARPing. They can turn so fast from this casual stuff to immersing the audience in their truly harrowing central story; the laughter and tears are always close together.
The funny parts have to be very funny, in order to justify spending so much of a comedy show on something so difficult, and Boxall reaches this high bar. The jokes are sharp, and even more enjoyable than they would be out of context, as they act as relief during the narrative. So much of this show is more than the sum of its parts. God’s Favourite references so many different topics to connect its ideas – ancient history, recent history, community, medical ableism, the tyranny of academia, and the almighty institution of Taskmaster. It’s a masterpiece that’s clearly been written and performed with great care.
Alex Finch