Hoots @ Nicolson Square
Aug 7-30
(21:25)
Any show with history at its core, & a performer happy to both explore its comedy potential while expressing a slightly hysterical passion for the past, will always draw me in to review it. The cyclic nature of time has long fascinated me, almost as much as the Late Bronze Age Collapse has for Jacob Hatton, one of the central themes of 2026 Fringe show, Ruins.
Even the date of the collaps, 1077 BC, is written down on one of several post-it notes hanging from the venue’s curtains, which somehow turn the Hoots’ shipping container into an idyllic little performance space. Other notes read Troy, Rome, stuff like that – a sparse but clever set of aesthetic accoutrements brightening up his stage, while simultaneously giving us the impression we’ve wander’d inside the working mind of a history obsessive.
Then the theme from The Mummy kicks in. It’s a perfect entrance really, for the rock-god handsome Jacob, tall & rangy, looks exactly like the kind of bloke Hollywood might cast as an adventure-archaeologist.
“People look at me & say I look like I know a lot about the Roman Empire,” he tells us.
And they would be right.
They say history is written by the victors, but Jacob informs us that it is, in fact, written by nerds – & Ruins is essentially a gregarious storytelling blossoming of his own inner nerd. “I love history,” he announces at one point. “History is the best thing in the world.” The wonderful thing is that you believe him completely.
Apart from the heavy expense of his post-it notes, Jacob has also brought a chair to they proceedings. Then, from a seated posture, to leaning against the speakers, to standing broad & tall, Jacob flutters around the room like some alpha butterfly, orating away as if he were Demodocus, the blind bard of ‘The Odyssey’ – a text he himself references in the show – transported three thousand years thro’ time & deposited in a shipping container.
This is cerebral stuff, certainly, but funny with it. Akkadian tablets complaining about irrigation get practically worshipp’d as sacred icons by Jacob, so much does he love his material. The thing is, you don’t need to be a history fan to enjoy the show either. Hatton hints at a reading list for those who fancy following him down the rabbit holes afterwards, but his asides keep the rest of us inform’d as we go. That’s an important part of his particular vibe. Most comedians simply want to make us laugh; Jacob seems genuinely to want us to leave knowing something we didn’t know when we came in.
Take the pyramid builders. Hatton delights in explaining that the people who built these apparently remote & mysterious monuments left their own marks upon them – workers giving themselves gang names, essentially the ancient equivalent of lads scrawling upon the building site. Jacob takes particular joy in reporting that “the drunk lads made this.” Suddenly the people behind the stones aren’t faceless ancient labourers at all. They’re blokes. They’re taking the piss. Thousands of years disappear in an instant.
That collapsing of historical distance is one of Ruins’ strongest tricks. Hatton keeps showing us that people in the ancient world were recognisably people, with much the same appetites, vanities, complaints & idiocies as ourselves. The technology changes; the human operating system apparently doesn’t. Which brings us to Keith.
Keith is one of the central characters of Hatton’s story, a bloke he encounters smoking crack on a train somewhere near Lambeth, only for the two of them to fall into a deep historical & theosophical conversation. In lesser hands Keith could easily become nothing more than an anecdotal oddball introduced for a cheap laugh. Hatton is far more interested in him than that. He listens. He engages. And before long this unlikely philosopher-companion has become part of the strange archaeology of Jacob’s own recent life.
Later the pair find themselves getting into trouble together at the British Museum, knee-deep in what Hatton describes as “protracted legal battles” with countries around the world rather keen on getting their imperial-era looted treasures back. Ancient civilisation, modern Britain & one of its most uncomfortable inheritances suddenly crash into each other, & Hatton is perfectly capable of putting an edge onto his historical enthusiasm when he needs to.
He’s just as cutting when he turns his attention to the present.
The modern world, Hatton suggests, is a world of lies. “This train has Wi-Fi,” for example – a promise which has apparently been running for about fifteen years without anyone seriously expecting it to come true. We’re all addicted to our phones; previous generations had their cigarettes. Civilisations congratulate themselves on progress while human beings simply find newer objects upon which to hang the same old compulsions.
And then Ruins begins quietly changing beneath our feet.
For all the history, archaeology & exuberant nerdiness, this is also a clever foray into the trials of one man’s very recent past. Since 2024 Hatton’s own little civilisation has been subject to something resembling its own Late Bronze Age Collapse. He loses his job in finance. His marriage goes. Things which seemed permanent suddenly aren’t.
We learn a surprising amount about him along the way. His mum is a passionate Millwall fan. His wife was a classical singer. These details accumulate like the fragments from an excavation, until we realise Hatton has been doing to himself exactly what historians do to vanished societies: picking through what remains & trying to work out what the hell happen’d.
Even the show’s wildest modern intrusion fits the pattern. Among all the Romans, Akkadians & collapsing empires comes Hatton’s battle with the 24 Hour MILF Hunters website, apparently desperate for his father’s money. It is an inspired collision of the lofty & the ludicrous. One minute civilisation is collapsing around the eastern Mediterranean; the next somebody is trying to stop Dad’s cash disappearing into the digital bowels of an online MILF operation.
But that’s Ruins. History doesn’t arrange itself according to dignity, & neither does life.
The title therefore becomes increasingly clever the longer Hatton talks. These are the ruins of Troy & Rome, certainly, but also the ruins of relationships, careers, families & versions of ourselves we once assumed would continue indefinitely. Civilisations don’t necessarily know they’re collapsing while they’re collapsing. Neither, perhaps, do people.
That gives the show an emotional architecture I wasn’t quite expecting from its exuberantly nerdish opening. Ruins is part pathos, part resurrection. Hatton is examining the debris of the last couple of years in much the same way he examines the debris of antiquity, looking for evidence that destruction is never quite the end of the story. Something survives. Something gets misunderstood. Something gets rebuilt.
I love Jacob’s vibe. He’s a natural storyteller & Ruins is a very pleasing, pleasant show, but he possesses a different energy to most comedians. He doesn’t seem desperate for the next laugh. He trusts the story, trusts the history & trusts us to come with him when things become cerebral, personal or strange. Most importantly, he wants us to be inform’d as well as entertain’d.
And his sheer joy in history is infectious. History, as Mr Erudition himself says, is the best thing in the world.
Damo
