When Joe Douglas visited his Auntie Marie in Uganda on his gap year a decade ago, it opened up the then-18-year-old's eyes to a world of possibilities.
One of these came in the form of Ronnie, a boy of his own age he instantly hit it off with. When Douglas returned to the UK, Ronnie sent him an email, asking him for a small amount of money to help get him through school. Another email followed, asking for more, and so it went, with assorted university fees, hospital bills and emergency payments, which combined almost hit the twenty grand mark.
And all the while Douglas was forking out all this, he was going through his own penny-pinching student years, and could have done with the extra cash himself.
By transferring his real-life experience into a very candid monologue, Douglas has laid what is either a divine faith in people or spectacular naivete bare in an honest and self-deprecatory fashion. Where the subject might sound like grim piece of emotional off-loading, there's a levity at the heart of Douglas's show that's aided by Lisa Sangster's bright design and Michael John McCarthy and Kim Moore's score.
Douglas himself appears to be without guile in a very real rites of passage that one suspects Douglas is still going through today.
Run ended.
HHH
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