Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The evening might not, in spirit, have been as dramatic as the last time Mark Thomas performed at the Liverpool Playhouse, nothing as spontaneous as a fire alarm and a public meeting by the old bandstand on Williamson Square to get the comedy juices flowing. Yet the air of supreme command of the English language, of taking an audience down the path of playful anarchy is in itself one that catches the night as if being hunted down and paraded through the streets of the cities of the U.K. for its absurd notions that we have allowed our green and pleasant land to become a haven for business to tell us where we can and cannot walk.
If you are looking for someone who can stand atop of a white mountain and cause avalanches of truth to tumble down and take out the ignorant, the greedy and the idle in thought from dawn till dusk, someone who you want to help stick the knife in to the shoulders, then it should be no revelation that Mark Thomas is the person you are looking for.
The mind races so quick as he talks of the way that business and commerce, of the odd international embassy, have somehow been able to stop the right of people walking where they want, the greed of councils as they fine the unfortunate rough sleepers and homeless; that there is no stagnation in the ongoing war against the insanity we have allowed to happen. Trespass, as the show suggests, is the vision of angels we all want to see fall to prove they are but devils with ideas of gentrification; an evil we must stop together.
With wonderful allusions to the previous show at the Playhouse, the thanking of the man in the audience who came up with the most sublime definition of Farage, the sheer bliss of understanding that we must exercise our right to be outraged by the creeping determination of those in charge to curtail our very existence and enjoyment and the surreal prospect of Shaun the sheep being arrested for walking backwards and forwards across a patch of land which someone determined with no authority belonged to them; this as ever, was a show of total commitment and delicious anarchic, but truth installed, intent.
A genuine man who holds all enthralled and fills them with passion, Mark Thomas is the person to look too when anger at the pettiness of greed needs to be voiced.
Ian D. Hall