Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved

The title makes it sound like just another stand-up comic with a theme, but Stefan Golaszewski is a storyteller in the mould of Ben Moor or Daniel Kitson, here with a lovely tale of love found and lost whose very ordinariness will make it resonate with almost everyone.

Golaszewski portrays himself when a callow 18-year-old (and he does perfectly capture the callowness of boys trying to be blokes) who saw the girl of his dreams in a pub. To his own amazement he worked up the nerve to approach her, to his delight she responded, and they had a near-perfect couple of evenings together until, inevitably, something got in the way and he never saw her again.

Golaszewski tells the story with such emotional openness and understated reality that everyone in his audience will be reminded of their own pasts and relive the pain and wonder of first love. He is particularly adept at capturing love’s glorious follies, from the way trying to express never-before-felt feelings leads you into poetry that is just beyond your grasp, to the suitcase stuffed with yeses he strews about the stage when she asks for a kiss.

It is a small story but a sweetly evocative one, for anyone who has ever been in love or wishes they had.