Catherine Bohart Turns OCD Into Standup Gold at Soho Theatre

Catherine Bohart opens her new standup hour, Borrowing Trouble, at Soho Theatre, London, with a problem of her own making: people talking about their mental health is boring. The Irish comic says so herself — and admits that even listening to herself do it frays her patience.

So what justifies an entire show built around her OCD? The answer, on this evidence, is the humour — rich and hard-won — and Bohart's trademark candour. Her condition is so all-consuming, the show suggests, that to leave it unaddressed might feel like dishonesty. For the 38-year-old comedian, that would be intolerably off-brand.

Borrowing Trouble is the latest bulletin from Bohart's fraught life. It finds her fulfilling an ambition close to all Irish hearts, she tells her audience: buying her first home. The move comes with complications. She is also moving in with her girlfriend, a step that puts direct pressure on her compulsion to control.

The options for relief look limited. She could move on to her fifth therapist, after the underachievement of the preceding four. She could try coming off antidepressants — though her doctor's response to that suggestion does not inspire confidence. Or she could seek refuge with her family. That route fails spectacularly, as illustrated by an ill-advisedly long visit home to her parents, a visit Bohart wryly labels a return to her symptoms.

That homecoming supplies the hour's most vivid material. We see her mum fret intrusively on Catherine's behalf. And in one eye-opening anecdote, her dad displays the type of behaviours that might — just might — suggest obsessive compulsions run in the family. Bohart lets the implication hang, and the audience draws its own conclusions.

The structure is simple: a life under strain, dissected in public. Bohart's approach to her OCD is neither lecture nor confession. It is material. She treats her own foibles — the dismay at them as much as the foibles themselves — as the raw substance of the hour, and works it until it pays off in laughs.

The result is captivatingly funny. The obsession with oversharing, the compulsion to control, the family whose patterns mirror her own: all of it feeds a performance that feels at once exposed and tightly managed. That tension — between chaos and control — is the engine of the show, and Bohart knows it.

Borrowing Trouble runs at Soho Theatre, London, and confirms Bohart's place among the most distinctive voices in British and Irish standup. For a comic whose brand is candour, the show raises a question she seems happy to live inside: when the material is your own mind, where does the honesty stop and the craft begin? On this evidence, audiences will keep showing up to find out.