Soho theatre, London
The nonconformist TV writer, film-maker, children’s author and standup is hired to find a new colour in this charismatically surreal hour
Fans of the former Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres know him to be the current torchbearer of Izzardian absurdism. Whether on television (Los Espookys, Fantasmas), in cinema (Problemista) or in his children’s book about an aspirational toilet plunger (I Want to Be a Vase), his is a world where inanimate objects are sentient and diversity thrives in defiance of the corporate. In Color Theories, the charismatic Salvadoran American comic reveals another string to his bow: “I’m sent all over the world to find colours,” he confides, daring us to doubt him.
Like his previous show, My Favourite Shapes, this is an hour of sit-down comedy aided by an overhead camera which relays Torres’s theories – illustrated with crayon squiggles – on to a screen behind him. Sporting a copper-coloured pixie cut and a pair of pink feather antlers, Torres himself resembles a child’s doodle. His inquisitive mind produces interconnected ideas about Catholicism, the blandness of Pixar and what orange sounds like, while his insights train us to spot “highly purple behaviour”. His casual millennial delivery, peppered with “um”s and “ah”s, makes surreal concepts sound like items on a brunch menu.
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