Carl-Einar Häckner: Handluggage

If there’s a show you shouldn't exit early this year – “early” being applied loosely to a performance that doesn’t so much end as slowly collapse – it’s Carl-Einar Häckner’s. Even if you’re on the verge of pissing yourself as the hour-mark nears, rest assured that by the time the long haired crackpot Swede is done showing off his painful looking hyper-literal mouth organ skills, you’ll be in good company. 

Häckner is best known in the UK through cabaret troupe La Clique, and Handluggage does have a vaudevillian air, employing gags, songs and knowingly crap comedy magic. It's all performed with the gormlessly panicked facial expression of a man trying to repair his space shuttle using a toaster manual.

The 'shit tricks come good and good tricks go shit' concept is nothing new—see Tommy Cooper—but through a mix of bumbling, screwball bewilderment and exaggerated Scandiness Häckner makes rote material fantastically his own. He crucially mistakes the word bandana for banana when working off a teach-yourself-magic cassette tape. He employs IKEA props which, suffice to say, prove less than durable. 

He should probably have quit while he was ahead with the mouth organ showstopper (what drives a man to try and fit a whole harmonica in his gob?), but the rest is deliciously weird. Shambling to an eventual end after a sweet singsong and a standing ovation for the Swedish hockey anthem, Häckner stands outside the venue nervously shaking departing audience members’ hands, looking sweaty and mildly disturbed. It’s fine to go now, or better still, run.