“A fringe like this is a real gift to a performer”: British comedian Mark Watson on performing in Prague
Comedian Mark Watson, a household name in the UK, was a star act at this year’s edition of the Prague Fringe. Having previously appeared on British shows like Taskmaster and Would I Lie to You?, his three performances at Malá Strana’s Metro Comedy Club brought Mark and his distinct style of stand-up to Czechia for the first time. Ahead of the second night on May 30th, Danny Bate met up with Mark to hear his impressions of Prague and to discuss what it’s like to perform comedy in another country.
Is this your first time in Prague?
“Actually yes, it is! I've had the good fortune to perform in all sorts of places, but I'd never been here until yesterday. I don't really know why, because I've been interested in the Czech Republic since its Czechoslovakian days. So, most of my life I've been drawn to the place, but it's never quite happened.
“Even this appearance of mine at the festival has been years in the making. The organiser, Steve Gove, and I meet on average about once every two years. Sometimes we meet at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and we've met in Australia before. Many years ago he first said to me, ‘I've got a festival going in Prague, you should come over’. I said that I'd love to do that, and we had versions of that conversation pretty much every two years for at least a twelve-year period.
“Then last year he approached me at the festival in Edinburgh, in the courtyard of the Pleasance Theatre in Edinburgh. Before he'd even started speaking, I said, ‘right, this time let's make it happen’. I took a business card and I emailed him that very same night. So that was last August. This has been nine months in the making, but as I say, it's after more than a decade of conversations.”
You are more or less fresh off the plane, having arrived yesterday. What have been your initial impressions of the place?
"There's a kind of awe at the architecture and the history, and how relatively unspoiled it feels"
“I got in about twenty-four hours ago and went straight to the theatre, so I didn't see a lot of Prague yesterday, although we did have a really fun night out, having dinner after the show. It's very much as I was hoping, really. We're talking here at the foot of the castle gates, looking out over most of Prague, and it is very beautiful. There's a real grandeur to it. I've been to slightly similar Central European cities, like Vienna, and it even reminds me of Munich. There's certainly a joy for a British person with the space, with the big city squares, and also all the colours. It's lovely to look out the window and feel so far from home. It's a very nice city.
“There's a kind of awe at the architecture and the history, and how relatively unspoiled it feels. Prague does have a reputation for attracting a lot of people on hen and stag weekends from the UK. But actually the communist and pre-communist-era centre that we've been to today very much still feels like its own thing, not particularly touristy. Of course, I'm a tourist myself, so I can't really complain. But yes, it has a real sense of its own identity.
“A lot of the buildings are absolutely magnificent. We're looking out over all these domes at the moment and you almost feel you could be further south in Europe. It's in a very interesting spot, I suppose, where it is in the heart of Europe. So yes, it's been an absolute pleasure so far.
“The audience last night was very nice as well. There's obviously a healthy British contingent here, although quite a number of Czechs as well last night, which was very nice.”
You're here as part of the Prague Fringe, and the show that you brought here to Prague is called Before It Overtakes Us. That sounds ominous. What's the meaning behind it?
“I suppose it is a little bit ominous. The show is inspired by a conversation I had with what was supposedly a customer service person, but proved to be a chatbot and AI. This was last year, and it was the first time I'd ever been successfully conned into talking to a non-human, believing that it was a human.
“It made me think a little bit about the changing face of humanity, faced by all of this technology. I'm 45. I've seen twenty years of relentless technological change. For most of it, I felt slightly behind the pace, but not in a way that's too much of a problem. Now it does feel as if it's getting away from me, and I can feel that the next generation is starting to do things which I don't understand.
“The show is a bit of a meditation on that, or at least some of it is. Last night, the show was pretty free-form, because having never set foot in the Czech Republic before, I felt I couldn't really resist talking a bit about that. So, the show, in its Prague-Fringe form, is a mixture of the show I've been doing in the UK and just some crowd interaction as well. The room is very small, the audience are right up close, so it's hard to resist. I'm chatting to them a bit in a non-threatening way. The British ambassador is meant to be coming tonight. So that feels like a great opportunity for crowd interaction, if I can identify him.”
The British ambassador is really quite popular here!
“So I gather. I've done a little bit of looking him up. He's got loads of social media followers, for example. I don't know if he will make it to the show. But if he does, it would be one of the more distinguished guests I have had in my time.”
You've hinted there at the content of the show. As a UK-based comedian, do you find that you have to adapt your material to an international audience? So that people get all the references, for example?
"Most of my shows tend to be about the human experience"
“It's a question that you're never quite sure how to answer. I've just come back from Australia, where I performed for six weeks. There, there's very little adaptation to make. The culture and the humour are so similar. In a place like this, of course, there's likely to be some adaptation. The crowd yesterday contained British people, also Czechs, but then a couple of Poles, Germans and Australians.
“Obviously, you have to try and make things as universal as possible, but by choice, not much of my material relies on politics or topical references. I think it would probably be harder to do a show here about UK politics and current affairs. But most of my shows tend to be about the human experience, and trying to find what is in common between people.
“That said, there are always going to be jokes that work well or less well among a new bunch of people. You can only find that out by doing it. Again, at a longer comedy festival, I'd have the luxury of two or three weeks, and I'd hone my idea of what the audience wants. Here, again, barely 24 hours in, I am guessing a little bit.”
Hopefully the Czech sense of humour is suitably similar enough that you'll be able to find common cause?
“The Czechs in the audience last night certainly seemed to enjoy it. You take it for granted, but it's remarkable that people can enjoy a comedy show in a second language, with all of the nuance and the wordplay you'd expect.
"It's remarkable that people can enjoy a comedy show in a second language, with all of the nuance and the wordplay you'd expect"
“As a British person, you get complacent about that. I've performed in the Netherlands and Denmark, and in fact yesterday I performed a late night show after my show, and there were people on the bill from India, Russia, Romania, all of them performing to each other in English. We're really spoiled, as Anglophones, how you can pretty much take it anywhere.
“Of course, in other countries, I can and would try to speak a little bit of German in Germany, and French in France, and I've tried to do snatches in those languages. Here, I've had very little time to adapt to the local language, so I'm going to, once again, rely on any Czechs there tonight to be fluent, or fluent enough.”
Given my experience, I think the English level will be just fine, and I think it may surprise you who is Czech and who is not.
“I certainly couldn't tell when I asked the crowd yesterday, because I was interested to know whether I had attracted any audience members who were not British. It was sort of gratifying to have some genuine Prague residents. But yes, as in so much of Europe, people's level of English is extraordinary.
“It's what makes us Brits so lazy about languages. We know anywhere we go, it will be done for us. I do have a go. I did French and German A-levels, so at one time I fancied myself as a linguist. In those days, in my early 20s, I'd have thrown myself into learning Czech before I got here. But that, again, is before the advent of phones that could do it for you in a second. It is easy to get lazy, but it's still well worth learning foreign languages, of course. If I lived here, I definitely would make the effort, but if you're here for three days, it's hard not to fall back on Google Translate.”
How important would you say that events like the Prague Fringe are in the life and the career of a comedian? What does it offer a comedian to come here and perform?
“One of the greatest gifts that a performer can have is to be taken by comedy to different parts of the world. I've visited quite a lot of places, and I think I eventually would have come to Prague anyway. That's the bluntest answer: it's really nice to come and visit places, and essentially make a holiday out of doing a fairly small amount of work.
“But also, I think it enriches you as a performer or any sort of artist, to see different parts of the world. We talked about the challenge of adapting to a different audience, an audience whose preconceptions and general experiences don't match with yours. All that is really good for a performer. It's easy to talk to any or every audience as if they are similar to you. But even the people who are British here, if they've been based in Czechia for a few years, they will have had a quite different few years from me. For a performer, it's always good to expand your horizons.
READ ALSO
“Then a bigger answer, I guess, is that during COVID, we experienced what it was like not to be able to travel, and not to be able to have comedy festivals and things like that. The room that I'm in here in Prague is about sixty people under a low roof, sort of a vault, and it would have been the first sort of place to shut down when the pandemic hit.
“Now we're a couple of years back into being able to do that, and to travel and enjoy being together as communities, I think there's a renewed sense of how valuable it is. One of the best things about comedy is the sense of connection and community, whether that's in London or Edinburgh, and a comedy festival is one of the best examples of that, because there's so many shows on. People come together and see things they never normally would. So a fringe like this is a real gift to a performer, but also hopefully a gift to the city that hosts it.”
Finally, you mentioned there the size of the venue that you're performing at. You've performed in bigger places, it’s safe to say, in some grand halls and theatres. Are there any potential challenges of switching to a venue of this size?
"These are the sort of gigs that you cut your teeth on"
“There are challenges at both ends of the spectrum, I suppose. Two weeks ago, I played in my home borough of London to almost a thousand people. The contrast between that and the sixty people in this room is quite a significant one. My average venue isn't enormous, but on tour I'm used to between 200 and 400 seats – big enough that the small theatre setting does give you a bit of a separation from the audience, which has its pros and cons. One of the pros is that you do get into kind of a comfort zone.
“In a venue like this, you really can see the face of almost everyone you're performing to. There's very little hiding from them. The front row are right up as far away as you are now from me. In many ways, I think most comedians really love it, because these are the sort of gigs that you cut your teeth on, that you come through doing, and you never quite forget the exhilaration of being in front of an audience at close quarters like that.
“But if you're not used to it, and I haven't played anywhere like this size for a while, it is an adjustment to remember to make. Even as you come into the venue, the chances are that you'll be mingling with your own audience. As you leave the venue, you also can hear them talking about you. It's a much more intimate experience in all ways. A lot of that is good for comedy, but it certainly keeps you on your toes. If there is someone that looks bored or hostile, which didn't happen last night, but if there were, I certainly would be very much more aware of them than I would have been in that 1,000-seater.”
Well, here's to a repeat performance of last night today!
“Let's hope so.”
