Comedy
Veronica Lee
How to describe a show that by Robin Ince’s own admission doesn’t have a narrative strand, and for which he has written several pages of notes that he gets through only a small section of? Well here goes: he calls the show a mash-up of the two cultures of art and science in a celebration of the human mind, and Chaos of Delight is very well named.Ince races through an almost embarrassing richness of material, going down highways and byways as he talks about whatever comes into his head or is prompted by a selection of photographs that he clicks on to the onstage screen.As anyone Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A Jerry Seinfeld appearance in the UK is an event. For one thing it's rare (he was last here in 2011) and for another he's a comic hero to many for his eponymous sitcom, which he co-created with Larry David.Seinfeld's opening set piece is about wasting time. No bragging, but he has a lot of time to waste these days, and we might as well waste our time spending an evening with him, wasting time together. It's typical Seinfeld – lengthy, seemingly freewheeling storytelling but which is precision-honed as goes down various highways and byways to get back to his original point.His shtick is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There has been a trend in stand-up comedy in recent years for intensely personal shows, confessional even, but it’s the comic’s life that is usually the one being examined for comedic effect. With Arthur Smith’s latest show at Soho Theatre, however, it is his dad’s life being described here, and what a life.Syd is a funny and touching account of a life well lived. Smith bases the show on the memoir he asked his father to write, which described, among other things, his wartime experiences at El Alamein and as a prisoner of war in Colditz. He later became a policeman whose south London beat was Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Frank Skinner walks onstage without introduction and a man in the audience gives him a friendly heckle by way of greeting. Skinner is straight on it, engaging him in a brief conversation; his responses are amiable enough but have a few barbs too.That's a Skinner hallmark: his smiley demeanour suggests a bloke you might have a nice chat with, but he doesn't suffer fools. And if the comic does less stand-up than broadcasting these days (his last new show was four years ago), he hasn't lost the art of the sly putdown.This hour-long set is a sort of preamble to his longer touring show, Showbiz, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people know Emily Atack from The Inbetweeners, where she played Charlotte, the object of Will's desire. More recently, she found new fans as the runner-up on 2018's I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! Now she is performing in her first solo comedy show, Talk Thirty to Me.It's not so much stand-up as a conversational run-through of how she came to be here, 29 and worried about hitting 30, and of her career to date. We see a montage of pictures on the large on-stage screen, ending with a video clip of Atack parachuting into the jungle and screaming every inch of the way. The show Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Al Murray's Pub Landlord character has been around since the mid-1990s. As such, it's a wonder that Murray has managed to reinvent the embittered, xenophobic loudmouth so many times, but he has – and the EU referendum in 2016 should have, you may have thought, given the character new life or killed him off altogether.What has happened, though, as Murray's latest show Landlord of Hope and Glory proves, is that the Pub Landlord has entered a state of stasis. Three years on from that seismic vote and after the UK was supposed to have left the EU, Murray has a dilemma. He could go with Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Once the self proclaimed poster girl for mental illness, Ruby Wax has evolved her stand up act, because, as she puts it, “everyone has mental illness now. It spread like wildfire.”It’s a tongue in cheek reference to the current supposed "fashion" for speaking up and out about mental health with the aim to de-stigmatise and taboo-bust – something that Wax has contributed hugely to over the years, by bravely opening up about her own journey to let other people know that it was OK to not be OK.Having left showbiz to pursue a Masters Degree in mindfulness based cognitive therapy at Oxford Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Taking place at the Theatre Royal, Andy Hamilton’s show is entitled An Evening with… rather than a straight stand-up and mainly consists of the comedy writer/performer and gameshow regular answering audience questions. During the first half this is done via raising a hand and shouting out questions; during the second half by leaving pieces of paper on the stage front during the interval. This isn’t, then, a riotous evening of laughs but more a gentle one of easy Sunday night chuckles, with Hamilton as much a raconteur as a comedian.The stage-set is simple, a mic, a table and a chair. Hamilton Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Let's start with that kiss – the one that propelled Seann Walsh from “Who?” in last year's Strictly Come Dancing line-up to being the “bad boy” of the series after pictures of his drunken late-night clinch with Katya Jones, his married professional dance partner, appeared in the tabloids.The title, After This One, I'm Going Home, is a nod to the laddish behaviour that many of Walsh’s previous shows have recounted and which – who knows – might have been useful advice to take earlier on the evening in question. Actually, the title and the tour were planned before he signed his Strictly contract Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Reginald D Hunter drops the n-bomb near the top of the show. He means no offence, he tells the audience, but it's the vernacular where he comes from in Georgia. And besides, using that word, as well as expressing some trenchant opinions about the differences between men and women, and the politics of race, has sort of become Hunter's calling card. Provocative, controversialist, whatever – as an African American living in the UK for the past 21 years, he has opinions worth listening to even if you don't share them.The genesis for his new show, Facing the Beast, was that anniversary, as well Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Komedia is a Brighton Institution and celebrates its birthday tonight in a suitably raucous fashion. The Komedia began in 1994, founded by the directors of the Umbrella Theatre Company, and styled on the cabaret spaces they’d experienced touring Europe. It moved to its current premises in 1999, turning a ramshackle labyrinthine building that housed a hippy-style market (before that a Tesco) into a labyrinthine building housing a bar-venue-cinema complex, with the central hub in the large basement.So much for architectural history! There’s also another anniversary this year, that of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mark Thomas issues a health warning for Check-Up: Our NHS at 70 at Battersea Arts Centre – “This show contains swearing, a video of an operation on a stomach and a description of being in A&E when a patient dies.” Indeed it does, but it also contains a heartfelt love letter to the health service Thomas was born in and, as a lifelong socialist, hopes to die in. But as he points to creeping commercialisation, what are the chances of that being so?The show, a highly entertaining 75 minutes, is based on a series of interviews that Thomas conducted with leading experts in Read more ...