Comedy
Veronica Lee
The first thing that greets the audience in the foyer for Danny Baker's new show, Good Time Charlie's Back!, which I saw at Princes Hall in Aldershot, is the merchandise stall, selling various items; T-shirts for £20, programmes at £10 (pre-signed!), and mugs for £8. But despite this naked determination to relieve punters of their wads, no one can accuse Baker of not giving value for money, as the show last three hours, and counting. Boy, can this man talk.On stage there is a large acreen, straddled by two smaller screens with what turns out to be a list of the subjects in his seemingly Read more ...
theartsdesk
Brighton Festival is the UK’s leading annual celebration of the arts, with events taking place in venues both familiar and unusual across Brighton & Hove for three weeks every May. This year, the Festival boasts an eclectic line-up spanning music, theatre, dance, visual art, film, comedy, debate and spoken word, with visual artist David Shrigley as Guest Director.Enter this competition by entering your details here for a chance to win a fantastic break for two over the closing weekend of Brighton Festival (Fri 25 – Sun 27 May).The prize package includes:A two-night stay at Sooty’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
With Love from St Tropez was inspired by Shazia Mirza's visit to a beach in the south of France that had a nudist beach nearby – and it was just before the French government's ban on burkinis. It's a great starting point for Mirza's stock in trade – speaking truths as a woman of Pakistani parentage that sit uncomfortably with the white British society she was born into – and, as someone with a public profile, caught in the uncomfortable (but comedically fertile) territory of being expected to speak for all Muslims, while the Muslim community just wishes she would shut up.Mirza, never a comic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Flo and Joan are sisters (Nicola and Rosie Dempsey: they have borrowed their stage names from their nan and her sister) and you may have recently seen them on television doing advertisements for Nationwide. Others may know them from social media, and their runaway hit “The 2016 Song” about music fans' annus horribilis with the deaths of David Bowie and Prince. If you like either iteration, you will love this hour-long show, called The Kindness of Stranglers.Nicola, always deadpan, is at the keyboard, while the chattier Rosie adds a bit of percussion on a shaker or triangle. The chat Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ed Byrne is a worried parent. Thankfully his two young sons are hale and hearty, but he is concerned he may be bringing up a pair of pampered, Lord Fauntleroy youngsters, and in Spoiler Alert he ponders the differences between his experience of being parented as a child in the 1980s, and now being a dad himself.He wonders if his generation of parents may be giving a little too much to their offspring in material terms – “Social services send a drone to check you have a full-size trampoline in the back garden,” he says. And it’s not just ownership of a bunch of stuff that delineates the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always nice to come away from a show having learned something and Angela Barnes, history buff and a woman with an obsession some may consider weird (more of which later), certainly fills in a lot of historical detail in Fortitude. Some of it touches on the Cold War and, as she drily points out, she never thought that section of the show, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, would be so up to date again.Barnes starts by talking about how she has recently entered her forties, but thankfully this is not a cue for pedestrian material about the perils of middle age. Rather, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may have seen Daliso Chaponda on Britain's Got Talent last year. He came third but, as he says, he was delighted as it brought him to a wider audience after working in comedy for 15 years – and made possible his first UK tour What the African Said. It draws on his peripatetic background (his father was a diplomat); he was born in Zambia, is Malawian by upbringing, spent some of his childhood in Zambia, Kenya and Somalia, and has been resident in the UK for 12 years after studying in Canada.Chaponda has great stage presence and some fine jokesHe's an instantly likeable performer, Read more ...
David Kettle
The crucial yet almost indefinable role of music in film – it’s a subject ripe for exploration and celebration, from the musicological technicalities of leitmotifs and ostinatos, through to the colourful characters working to bring directors’ sometimes vague musical notions to sonic reality. All of which gets raced through in this jam-packed documentary by first-time director Matt Schrader, a somewhat frenetic, 93-minute dash through the subject.Schrader has clearly put in a massive amount of work, and Score is very much a labour of love. He’s amassed dozens of interviews, with remarkable Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Evans, at 52, is far too young to be a grumpy old man, but he’s doing his best to prepare for the role, with this amusingly dyspeptic standup show at Soho Theatre about the ageing process, and how the evolutionary model appears to be moving backwards. According to his show Genius, things really aren’t getting better, at least in terms of human intellect and those who lead us.He starts by talking about the perils of ageing, about his thinning hair, senior moments and losing his spectacles. So far so predictable, but Evans has a breezy conversational style and a pleasingly original take Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Glasgow International Comedy Festival kicked off with a performance by one of its most popular performers, Craig Hill, a comic far better known in his native Scotland than south of the border. That may be because his shtick relies so much on knowing the ins and outs of Scottish social classification – anyone from Fife, Paisley or Aberdeen was fair game for insults here, but non-Scots may be none the wiser.Hill, dressed in a petrol-blue kilt and kick-ass boots, started the show by gyrating to a dance track as he came on stage at Òran Mór. If wearing fetching kilts is Hill’s trademark, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Fern Brady is a young Scot with plenty of provocative opinions – on politics, society and relationships – with a delivery that can only be described as dry as a desert. It means that some pieces of information – as well as a few gags – take some time to pass through the “Is she joking?” filter. In Suffer, Fools she likes to confound audiences with two pieces of information she relates in fairly quick succession; she studied Arabic and Islamic history at Edinburgh University, and she put herself through college by performing at the city's “titty bars”.Brady neatly fillets those men who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
New Zealand comic Rose Matafeo is a fan of romcoms and has decided she is destined to appear in one at some point in her career. As she explains, it's not possible – as a mixed-race woman – to play the film's heroine, but she is surely a shoo-in for the role described in show's title, Sassy Best Friend; after all, she has the wild hair, the specs and the perky personality that such a character demands.This is a breezy but wry set-up for an hour of comedy that subtly examines race, feminism and mental health as Matafeo explores her teenage anxieties and how she has (mostly) overcome them as an Read more ...