In the beginning, there was only…

Nathan Crothers &The VOICES appears as part of the first Maynooth Comedy Festival.

Title: In the beginning there was only…

In the beginning there was only… is a stand-up/performance art show that deliberately fragments form, authorship, and attention. Performed by Nathan Crothers and the Voices, the show presents itself as a malfunctioning comedy set that keeps collapsing into sketches, audience tasks, conceptual games, corporate rituals, and moments of apparent failure.

Thematically, the show explores alienation under capitalism, productivity culture, and the pressure to be coherent, likeable, and progressing—both as an artist and as a person. Rather than following a traditional narrative, the structure mimics the way thought actually operates: interrupted, looping, contradictory, and overstimulated. Ideas begin, fail, restart, and are outsourced to the audience. Genre-wise, the work sits between stand-up comedy, absurdist theatre, and live performance art. Jokes coexist with anti-jokes; sketches dissolve before resolving; the audience is repeatedly repositioned as collaborators, test panels, focus groups, or unwilling co-producers of the show. Nathan’s onstage persona appears confused, self-important, and incompetent, but this incompetence is a deliberate device used to critique spectacle, authenticity, and the expectation that comedy should offer clarity or catharsis. The show draws on absurdism, situationist ideas, and meta-theatrical stand-up.

In the beginning there was only… is not a work-in-progress in the traditional sense, but a performance that stages the anxiety of process itself—where beginning is the only thing that ever seems to happen.