Taking a new show to the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe with his show Grenade, Harry Stachini talks to Pepper&Salt about Grenade, the meaning behind the metaphor and the rhetorical question that he poses to audiences.
What is your elevator pitch?
Through the show, I explore what my grenade was, what I did with it as a result of learning from people around me, i.e. like my mum and dad, and how kind of their relationship functioned when I was younger. But it’s not highbrow, it’s very, very accessible, it’s very funny. It’s just very funny. But it’s not anything that’s too complicated. When I’ve had people that have seen previews and stuff, they’ve said to me like, “Oh, I’ve definitely had a grenade,” or have started to share something with me when I’m a bit like, “Fair enough, but I don’t think I’m the person you should be saying that to.”
As well as being up there doing my show, I’m doing two others as well, which is, one is a live podcast, which is great fun, is called All Made Up. And it’s essentially a writer’s room. So, there’s three hosts, and say, if you were the guest, you would join us in the writer’s room. And we would create a story out of nothing in the space of a half an hour. All we’d ask from you is like, what would your character’s name like to be? Say, they were called Ben, we’d say, “how old’s Ben?” You tell us what they do for a job, we flesh it out again and again, about 10 minutes. And then we have three pots, which is like a start card and an end card. Pick up the start card. And it could be like, the day has come Scotland have invaded England. And then the final line might be the doctor said it had to be cut off. And then we’ve got half an hour to get from A to B. And we’ll be like, right, so what day did Ben realize Scotland had invaded England? And this story kind of, you know, rolls out. And so we’re up there doing that as well, for two weeks of the run, if people are interested. But I’m very excited to do that. It’s very different to stand up, stand-up’s obviously, very scripted, as this podcast is like just playing on the on stage for an hour every day. We’ve had like loads of great guests in it, we’ll always have like comedians and writers and actors. It’s all made up every week’s different. And I guarantee one of them will eventually get made into a film.
How do people find what their ‘pin’ or ‘grenade’ is?
Well, I think, to me, it’s something in your life that you know you should be dealing with, but you don’t. And that could be like, so I’m definitely doing a job that I really enjoy, right? And stand up is, no one’s asking me to do it, but there’s a lot of sacrifices you make to kind of do it as a job. Whereas there’s people I know who make 100 grand a year, but they don’t smile. Because they absolutely despise what they do nine to five. But in their head, they’re like, “I can pay my mortgage off in this amount of time, and then I can retire in this amount of time.” But there’s still things which like, they grit their teeth, and they go, “I’ll deal with this later, I’ll deal with this later.” So, like working in a job that’s just not making you happy, and you feel like you know you should be doing something else, but you don’t, that would be a grenade. Maybe someone in your life that you know you should be standing up to, you don’t, that could be a grenade. Or the idea of being in a relationship that you know isn’t working anymore. And like, have you ever heard of sunken cost fallacy? So that idea of like, you’ve been in the queue 20 minutes, why leave now because you’ve been in it 20 minutes. Now if you put that into 20 years, that’s a completely different kettle of fish. And I’ve seen from people around me, in terms of relationships I’ve been in where- I don’t think I’m cynical- but I think sometimes things aren’t necessarily meant to last forever. And that doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time, but you could have a good 10 years with someone, and it just maybe comes to its natural conclusion. But I think there’s some people that depending on what the circumstances are, or how they look at it will go, I will sit in this. Because safety is far more attractive than happiness. “I will clutch on to this because it is reliable, it is consistent, but I will forfeit maybe other areas of my happiness.” And I think when I look at relationships, and I’ve had people after the previews come up to me, a lot of it tends to be, “I don’t think this is working in the way it used to.” And I’m like, “I’ve never met your partner. I’ve just met you for the first time.” This isn’t this isn’t for me to tell you what to go and do. And the show isn’t, I’ve got all the answers.
The message is that what you do is totally down to you. But you know, the steps I’ve taken have meant I’ve been able to get to the point where I am now with it. I ask the audience, if you if you do have a grenade in your life, and you could picture for a second, what your life would look like, if you did pull the pin on it? What would that look like? And I think it’s kind of like a nice thing to leave people on. But it’s very funny, like the stand up in it, the routines are… I’m not going for claps, where people are just like clapping, instead of laughing at punchlines. And it’s very club stand up. And it doesn’t pull punches. But I think that theme of honesty throughout is relatable with people because they sit there and go, “All right, okay. You can’t not feel something to it, because it’s very real things you’re talking about.”
“The message is that what you do is totally down to you. But you know, the steps I’ve taken have meant I’ve been able to get to the point where I am now with it. I ask the audience, if you if you do have a grenade in your life, and you could picture for a second, what your life would look like, if you did pull the pin on it? “
How did you come up with that metaphor or image of the grenade just out of curiosity?
When I was talking about it to people about when I pulled the pin on mine, you got to understand in my head, I’d taken 12 months to get to the point where I was going to pull it. So, I held on to it for a while. And the idea of holding on to it being like this thing could go off at any time. But if I hide it, you know, then no one knows about it. But you try and carry a grenade on you every day, it’d be difficult for you to keep that concealed. So, when I did pull the pin, I felt so much better, because I’m like, I now don’t have to carry this thing with me. But I don’t think I fully anticipated – and this is like, you know, being a younger, naive lad – the gravity of that going off in someone’s hands, and how that then the fallout of that situation. You could present someone with a grenade, and you pull the pin on it, and they go, “Actually, this is fine, you know, and then it gets thrown away.” But if they go, “No, this is not fine,” and they still got hold of it, then it goes off in a way that’s disastrous. Hurting someone that you care about hurts everyone involved. And there’s no there’s no there’s no villain or hero or winner or loser in any of the show itself. And if anything, it’s just the idea of like, this is what I did and I don’t know what you would do in that situation. But I think honesty, in my opinion, is always the best policy. But how that lands on someone else? Yeah, doesn’t always look pretty.
What is your favourite story to tell about performing in different countries?
A lot of it involves drinking, I’ll be honest. So, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily artistically fulfilling. I’ve done loads. In the last six weeks I was doing, I was on a Virgin cruise that was going Tenerife, Barcelona, Tenerife, Morocco, Barcelona. And that was amazing. You know, to be doing stand-up in a 400 seat theatre, two shows a week, and then you get looked after, you kind of pinch yourself going, “This is my job.” And you’re eating five-star cuisine. I think I put on about three stone in a week, because it’s just unlimited food. I’d walk past the ice cream parlour and I’m like, “I’ll have three scoops of everything you’ve got, please.” So, things like that are real, like you do a flat roof social club in the northwest of England where I live and it’s just a different feel. That idea of different rooms, and then you’re on this cruise ship, you know, floating around the Mediterranean. But the different feels that you have in different rooms. I’ve been to Dubai, done shows there, ended up getting invited out on a boat party with some of the audience the next day. Me and another comedian went out on this massive, super yacht. Never been in one of my life. Dubai is not somewhere where I would holiday, but I had the opportunity to work. So, I was like, “Let’s go and give this a go.” And then on this super yacht, it’s the only day in Dubai where it absolutely pissed it down. So, we’re on this massive boat in the middle of the ocean, and the water is just bouncing off the surface. I was like, well, you can’t have it all.
By Katerina Partolina Schwartz
Photo Credit: Lewis Coleman
Pepper & Salt 
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