Peter Serafinowicz’s self-styled “businessman, entrepreneur and business man”, Brian Butterfield (pronouns business/man) is a larger-than-life character – despite the patented Butterfield Diet Plan. The undoubted star of the criminally short-lived Peter Serafinowicz Show has everything it takes to get ahead in business – resilience, self-belief and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to re-re-mortgage his house – and has come to Cardiff’s New Theatre for The Call Of Now tour to share the secrets of his “success”.
The Call Of Now has lofty TED Talk pretensions: an expert/life coach offering insights and imparting invaluable lessons gleaned over the course of his career. The reality is, inevitably, more like the worst kind of corporate training seminar, in that you feel yourself being dragged (willingly, in this case) into a thicket of painfully mangled metaphors and convoluted mnemonics by someone of questionable authority and acumen in an ill-fitting suit.
There are crowd-pleasing callbacks to the Diet Plan – most notably at the interval, during which images of potential snackage are projected onto the onstage screen (“corn explosion”, “Mexican triangles” and “meat pipe sandwich”, anyone?) – but for the most part Butterfield is focused on the now, and the future. A unique visionary in some respects, with his finger on the pulse and his ear to the ground, he’s also an everyman desperately trying to keep pace with technology even if he doesn’t fully understand it. Hence the launch of his own streaming service (Buttflix) and cryptocurrency (Buttcoin), and the development of an artificial intelligence model (BriAIan) that may need a few tweaks. Musk and Bezos have their own space programmes, so why shouldn’t he?
Serafinowicz is a superb impressionist, so can be forgiven for finding an excuse to briefly break character and give us his Sir Ian McKellen as part of a hilarious routine during which Butterfield gets hopelessly lost offstage in search of the toilet. He keeps each show fresh and novel, both for himself and his audience, by involving volunteers in proceedings: a mock interview scenario that spirals out of control; a competition to find the best new business ideas, which he’s creatively called Brian’s Den. (I can’t say I’ve ever wished for dissolvable socks before, but perhaps there’s a time and a place.)
The Call Of Now has a narrative arc, in that Butterfield experiences an uncharacteristically low moment but emerges having learned something himself. By the end, he’s once again puffing out his chest, the audience’s applause and chants of his name having the same effect psychologically as the defibrillator did physically at the start of the show. Defeatism be damned. He gets knocked down; he gets up again. He’s a dreamer, an innovator, a blue-sky thinker who refuses to let fripperies like practicality, personal incompetence and perennial bankruptcy stand in his way. He is the best of us.
Brian Butterfield’s Call Of Now, New Theatre, Cardiff, Fri 7 June
words BEN WOOLHEAD