Comedy
Veronica Lee
Katherine Ryan was making her West End debut – a big moment in any comic’s career – but she made her entrance on stage at the Garrick unannounced. Yet if the opening to Glitter Room was strangely underwhelming, it wasn’t long before the Canadian’s trademark waspish style was to the fore and the sass kicked in.The title, and much of the show, was inspired by Ryan’s nine-year-old daughter. The glitter room is what they call Ryan junior’s bedroom, a fairylight- and sparkle-filled riot of pink that a builder told Ryan senior would put men off staying in the house.No problem: as Ryan says Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When the League of Gentlemen – Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, plus non-performing writer Jeremy Dyson – reformed for an excellent series to update us on events in Royston Vasey (“portal to another world, or just a shit hole?”) for the BBC last year, they enjoyed it so much that they announced a tour for 2018, their first live show since late 2005.There is more than a whiff of nostalgia in the first half as the trio – dressed incongruously in dinner suits for their black comedy as they were when they started out in the mid-1990s – perform some old favourites. The audience Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As we enter the venue, Rose Matafeo is playing a game of mini table tennis with a member of the audience. Nothing that follows seems to relate to this “just a bit of fun to start the show” – but, trust me, it's one of the cleverest bits of misdirection you will ever see. The penny drops only at the end of Horndog, for which the New Zealander deservedly won the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award for best show at the Fringe at the weekend.It's a high-energy hour, as Matafeo gallops through heaps of gag-laden material in a show that she says more than once is just about having fun, but which Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rosie Jones ★★★★There are two versions of Rosie Jones, she tells us; one nice, one not so nice. And who knows which of those would have won the battle of psyches if the comic had not been deprived of oxygen for a quarter of an hour during birth, she asks in Fifteen Minutes. It's a terrific device – subtle but pointed, witty but poignant – as she muses about what kind of person she might have been without cerebral palsy.Jones is a mischievous woman and likes subverting people's expectations, manipulating the audience into uncomfortable moments, and then relieving the tension with a killer pay- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Luisa Omielan ★★★★Luisa Omiela, a confirmed party girl, is the first to admit she used to hate politics, and had difficulty in working out the difference between Conservative and Labour (well, that goes for most people these days, but we'll let that pass). Then a big life event occurred and it made her dive deep into how political decisions affect our everyday lives, however we vote, or even if we don't vote. And so Politics For Bitches was born.The arguments around politics are like a massive penis knocking us in the face all the time, she says, so she wants to break down the big issues for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ari Shaffir ★★★★★There are some super-talented US comics at the Fringe this year, and Ari Shaffir is among them. The edgy, no-holds-barred New Yorker lays it out there with his show title, Jew, in which he charts why he has left his Orthodox upbringing behind. It started by asking questions of his rabbis – and two years at a yeshiva (a school that focuses on the study of the Talmud and the Torah) in Israel gave him the ammunition, but perhaps not in the way his teachers had intended.As you might expect of a dry-witted comic, the questions were not of the existential variety but rather ones Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alex Edelman ★★★★★When Alex Edelman first appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 he walked off with the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer. Now in his third stand-up show, Just For Us, he delivers a beautifully constructed hour of narrative comedy.He starts with Koko the sign-language-speaking gorilla and ends with how Nazis are hiding in plain sight. That he gets from one to the other in an hour that includes anecdotes about meeting Prince William, receiving anti-Semitic abuse online, his brother who competed in the Winter Olympics for Israel (“or Schul Runnings as I call Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Bohart ★★★★Catherine Bohart tells us at the top of the show that she is the bisexual daughter of an Irish Catholic deacon, which is, when you consider it, a niche description. Oh, and she has OCD. That’s quite an introduction, and she more than lives up to it in this debut show, Immaculate.Her style is conversational as she rattles through her realisation about her sexual preferences and her mental health, as well her father’s reaction to them. She is very close to him, and a story about his childhood is a neat throughline in the show.His story, of emotional neglect, is of an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Flight of the Conchords first played at the Edinburgh Fringe they were a sleeper hit, championed by other comics and loved by critics. In 2003 they were nominated for best show in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, a Radio Two series followed, then two series of an HBO mockumentary in which they played fictionalised versions of themselves as innocents abroad trying to make it in New York, with fellow Kiwi Rhys Darby as their manager (pictured below).Now Jermaine Clement and Bret McKenzie have returned to do live dates in the UK for the first time since 2010, and this show – a collection of old Read more ...
theartsdesk
Are you a young blogger, vlogger or writer in the field of the arts, books and culture? If so, we've a competition for you to enter.The Hospital Club’s annual h Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. For the second year running they are teaming up with theartsdesk – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to launch a hunt for young talent.This year the Special Award is for theartsdesk / h Club Young Influencer Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie tells us at the top of the show that she is a heterosexual, able-bodied, privileged white female – so why is she feeling so discontented? As she explains with great verbal dexterity in What Now?, it is living in a post-EU referendum world that has made her feel so discombobulated; left and right have no meaning any more, and – like so many British voters – she doesn’t know where her political home is.The Brexit vote has created some odd bedfellows, she says; it came as a big shock when lap-dancing club owner Peter Stringfellow said he was a fellow Remainer – because he didn’t Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For her past few shows, Sarah Kendall's stock in trade has been intricately crafted stories that mix fact and fiction, drawing on her childhood in Newcastle, New South Wales, and observations about the world she now lives in. Her latest show, One-Seventeen, continues in that vein, and this time she has threaded in some deeply personal material.The narrative moves back and forth between her childhood and her life today in south London as a married mother of two. Kendall tells us she's a mixture of her histrionic mother (whose cartoonish voice is superbly rendered here) and her scientist, facts Read more ...