Rosie Wood

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  • Measure For Measure & Julius Caesar – Dirty Politics Double Bill

    Rating: 2 out of 5.

    Politics, manipulation and deceit: these are the themes that connect the two plays — the tragedy Julius Caesar and the comedy Measure for Measure — that the Shake-Scene Shakespeare theatre company have paired together in this split bill. The real defining feature of the evening, however, is the company’s cue-scripted performance.

    Cue scripting is a historical performance method in which actors receive scripts containing only their own lines and the cues that precede them. There are no rehearsals beyond a quick run-through of entrances, exits and, in this case, the violent scenes. A Cue Holder (Lizzie Conrad Hughes) sits to the side with a full script, ready to prompt actors if they lose their place; and today they do, frequently.

    The technique attempts to recreate the conditions of Shakespeare’s theatre. In Elizabethan playhouses, there were no directors, and companies might perform a different play every day. Actors would not necessarily know the full text of the play, partly to prevent scripts being sold to rival playhouses and partly to minimise the need for expensive printed copies.

    Hughes opens the evening with a pre-show monologue in iambic pentameter, telling us that “our floor is a casino.” Yet the gamble is not quite the thrilling theatrical risk the metaphor suggests. Instead, it often feels as though we are gambling simply on whether the company will make it to the end of the play. Shake-Scene places this very difficult and technical task in the hands of performers who appear either amateur or unfamiliar with the technique. The dominant feeling is awkwardness, as actors hesitate over their lines and seem to hold their breath in case they interrupt someone else. Rather than encouraging deeper embodiment of character, there appears to be little room for characterisation at all; most of the actors’ energy is directed toward simply getting the lines out.

    The absence of blocking adds to the sense of clunkiness. At times, actors move abruptly or uncertainly, such as during the scene in which Brutus is visited by Caesar’s ghost, where performers circle the stage in a slightly haphazard pattern. In larger group scenes, characters often appear to stand around awkwardly, arranged in ways that feel unnatural.

    The production is openly self-deprecating, frequently acknowledging and even leaning into its rough edges. At the end of the first half of Julius Caesar, Hughes remarks, “And that’s what Shakespeare looks like when you don’t rehearse it,” before clarifying, “So Caesar has just died, if you didn’t get that.” These moments are genuinely funny, but they also reinforce the sense that what we are watching is closer to a workshop demonstration than a fully realised performance.

    The format fares better in the second section with Measure for Measure. Comedy proves more forgiving of hesitation and mistakes: one line mishap becomes an accidental Freudian slip from the otherwise earnest Isabella (Halli Pattinson), which only adds to the chaos. The rhythms of comic dialogue also seem easier for actors to navigate, and the inevitable stumbles can be folded into the comic timing.

    Still, there is something genuinely appealing about the spirit of the company. Shake-Scene Shakespeare runs workshops and training sessions for actors who want to get into Shakespeare, and the atmosphere on stage suggests an inclusive and supportive community. As an educational exercise or participatory exploration of historical theatre practice, the project has clear value. Whether it translates into a satisfying experience for a paying audience, however, is another matter.

    Written by William Shakespeare
    Produced by Shake-Scene Shakespeare

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Measure For Measure & Julius Caesar – Dirty Politics Double Bill, Golden Goose Theatre

  • Shenoah Allen: Bloodlust Summertime

    Rating: 3 out of 5.

    American actor and comedian Shenoah Allen takes us to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for an hour of stand-up about his upbringing that plays out like a warped cartoon memoir. He performs it accordingly: an array of wacky voices, rubber-limbed physicality, and a face that seems capable of rearranging itself at will. His spirit appears equally malleable, surviving stories of witnessing murders, staring into the barrel of a gun, and growing up in a family that would buy LSD in bulk. Yet beneath the elastic performer is a human being carrying what he calls an “unnamed dread”, framing the show as a kind of pseudo-therapy session — a bold move, given how heavily this confessional approach to stand-up has been criticised of late. When you hear the wild stories, however, you cannot accuse him of self-indulgence.

    Fragmentation dominates the experience of watching this show. Allen begins with a string of false claims. He arrives speaking in a Latino accent as the owner of a shop called “Masks y Más” (Masks and More), but he is not Latino. He slips into a voice with a camp lilt, but he is not gay. He tries on a Cockney accent, but he is certainly not from London. One by one, these personas are discarded. Only after shedding these layers of character does he finally appear as himself.

    Yet when he does, the fragmentation remains. He drifts from story to story, touching on so many complex themes that it becomes difficult to keep track. Rather than being guided through his life in a way that fosters connection, we feel as though we are only scratching at the surface of each experience before moving on to the next.

    For all his acting competency, Allen is actually quite shaky in this performance; his tone carries a note of anxiety, and you find yourself anxious for him as he staggers towards his punchlines. A firmer sense of control would strengthen the comedic element considerably. The raw material of his life offers rich comic potential, but the execution is equally rough, making it difficult to mine that gold fully.

    This is not fast-paced, punchy stand-up but slower, more reflective storytelling, so a more assured tone — even simply to frame the tales — would allow us to relax and listen. He adds texture with audio clips: recordings of his father, the hum of cicadas, the sound of his father’s feet crossing the driveway. These details are evocative, yet they are not seamlessly integrated into the comedy. They jar slightly, drawing attention to the broader issues of flow. At times, it becomes difficult to concentrate.

    What Allen brings to life most vividly is Albuquerque itself. You can almost see the warm tones of the landscape and feel the heat radiating from the desert, even while sitting in a black box on a cold, rainy day in Soho.

    Leaving the theatre, we have heard a great deal about his life, yet giving his dread a name still feels a million miles away. A single word could not capture such a scattered narrative. It is as though he has not yet processed these experiences enough to shape them into something as technical and controlled as narrative stand-up. The heart is there, but the craft is missing.

    Written by: Shenoa Allen 
    Directed by: Kim Noble

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Shenoah Allen: Bloodlust Summertime, Soho Theatre

  • Creepy Boys: SLUGS

    Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

    Two “Creepy Boys” shuffle onto the stage in sleeping bags as gastropods with vagina mouths. They regurgitate and eat a spoonful of beans, sing a song about Donald Duck and his lack of trousers, strip to reveal duck-like underwear with a strategically cut hole, offer the audience sweets, and eventually unleash a pantomime horse that shoots us in the face. Rate this experience out of five. It feels like a mad request.

    Beneath the mania, however, lies an Edinburgh Comedy Award–nominated piece of abstract performance art about a desire for nothing: innocence, physical substance without connotation — the thought equivalent of slugs. The opening song announces this mission plainly: the show is about nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. But achieving nothingness is harder than it looks, and the struggle to do so fuels this wild ride.

    Through an anxiety-fuelled stream of puppet shows, songs, sketches, and even a conversation with a paper Joni Mitchell, the Creepy Boys repeatedly demonstrate that everything is connected to something — and not just something neutral, but something politically or socially charged. A slideshow contrasts an egg (nothing) with a battery hen (something), and a person dressed as a ghost (nothing) with the same image altered by the addition of a pointed white hat (something). Even arbitrary physical movements performed by S.E. Grummet are instinctively ranked by the audience as more or less “something.”

    Grummet’s trans identity becomes a particularly pointed example of this “something-ification.” They cannot simply sing a song without it becoming a “trans song.” In one moment, the duo is prancing with their trousers off; in the next, erupting into despair at the impossibility of being neutral. If they are not the same as each other, then their bodies carry meaning, implication, and politics. Nothingness becomes unreachable.

    The visual elements of the show really elevate it. There’s a handmade aesthetic that is fun and, ironically, quite sweet. A projection of a miniature paper set, manipulated by either one of the Creepy Boys while the other acts in the scene, has real charm. It’s detailed and nicely crafted — the antithesis of AI-generated, soulless fodder.

    That said, some stylistic choices feel slightly dated: colourful geometric shapes and those specific cargo trousers they wear hark back to 2021, and sticking googly eyes on everything — including the genitals — is slightly reminiscent of a 90s art school project. At times, the humour veers into mild cringe — calling guns “pew-pews,” a childishness of tone creeping in occasionally, and a tad too much screaming. Alongside some of the wildness on stage, it may lose some people. The show is always intelligent and forceful, but occasionally its appeal thins. It could do with a facelift for 2026.

    One of the final scenes lands particularly well. Beginning with comic timing and exaggerated sincerity, they pivot to gun violence in America. The audience teeters between laughter and a sudden “oh God, I should not be laughing” feeling. That is the central danger the show exposes: innocent fun can become a profound difficulty at the drop of a pair of cargos.

    Perhaps the purest “nothing” in the piece is what the performers gain from it. By their own admission, this is hardly a transferable skill. It will not make them cash-rich or bring them fame. Are they even doing anything to change the world? The show ends with a video of the pair burrowed underground together, hopeless, before releasing the gun-toting pantomime horse.

    It’s definitely impactful, and the audience response feels divided — some fully immersed, others visibly unsure. Outside performance-art circles, its appeal will inevitably be limited. But SLUGS commits fiercely to its premise, is completely cohesive, and achieves what it sets out to do. Whether you admire it or recoil from it, it doesn’t beat around the bush. They don’t ask for stars; they ask for opinion, and they are thorough in putting their point across.

    Writers: S.E. Grummett and Sam Kruger

    Published with The Reviews Hub

    Creepy Boys: SLUGS – Soho Theatre, London

  • Josh Sharp: ta-da!

    Rating: 5 out of 5.

    More people than they would like to admit feel a flicker of excitement at the word PowerPoint. Few elements of office life have been resurrected for entertainment purposes so enthusiastically: fringe shows, TikTok trends, even full-blown PowerPoint parties. With ta-da! Josh Sharp makes the most of this format while stripping it to its bare bones — mostly blank white slides with black letters, which are often beautifully arranged as minimalist images that give the illusion of detail. There are 2,000 of them over seventy-five minutes.

    According to Sharp, this is theater theatre, not just stand-up, which he calls “bullshit” — especially considering the extra effort involved: he has chained himself to 2,000 cues. But bullshit feels like a deliberately harsh way of simply describing illusion. His jokes work like mathematical formulas or magic tricks, twisting spelling, punctuation and capitalisation — setting what’s on screen against what he says aloud. He is a master of irony and layers.

    There are so many bad pronoun jokes about at the moment, but one of the favourite moments here is an observation that as we age, our gender becomes less visible: we become less of a he or a she or a they, and more of a that. Sharp delights in the hidden implications of seemingly unassuming words, finding punchlines in their grammatical structure — a kind of verbal trickery that has you laughing at jokes built almost entirely from language itself. It’s good bullshit.

    He paces the evening expertly. Repetition forms the beating heart of the show, and live, the rhythm he creates consistently triggers laughter. He begins with punchy, word-based, quick-fire jokes, then moves into more complex narrative work surrounding his mother’s death and his own near-death experience — just as we begin to run out of energy for so much laughter. From there, he shifts again, into a more intellectual section about Schrödinger’s cat. There are also clear threads throughout. “Time <—> is a line, that’s how it works,” he says — a simple thought that is not really simple at all. We know this because he has played with it so thoroughly, fooling us again and again.

    Some of the humour here is quite blue, with a considerable focus on cum, much of it tied to his coming-out experience and his unbridled gallop into the New York gay scene after years of suppressing his sexuality in the South. Yet it is so rigorously shaped by an understanding of joke structure and language that it never feels like smut for its own sake or shock for shock’s sake.

    It’s not often you get a show that is so much fun in the moment and then so interesting to talk about afterwards, but this is that. The techno music before the show starts sets us up for a party, and then we are suddenly in philosophy, maths, grammar, science, grief, sexuality — and it is still a party. In terms of charisma, Sharp is a superstar. This especially comes through in a viral video of him watching Adele in concert with his dad: his dad belting along is endearing, but Sharp’s whooping beside him is hilarious. His energy feels boundless. He is an artist — and he is not afraid to tell us so.

    The show finishes with a trick-trick: he deliberately messes up a pick-a-card routine, and the final slides of the show turn out to be part of the deck itself. It is a strangely moving ending, one that means everything and nothing. Was the point of the show that we can read one thing and hear another? That time is a line? That Sharp is gay? Why do these shows have to end on a point at all? By refusing to pick one clear meaning, is he once again skewering the “industry-standard” expectation? It feels like another trick. It takes a sharp thinker to be so cheeky.

    Ta-da! is an instant recommendation. You leave the theatre completely satisfied: you’ve laughed, you’ve thought, you’ve felt. Sharp keeps you fully in the moment while you’re there, and thinking about it long after you’ve left.

    Written by: Josh Sharp

    Published with the Reviews Hub

    Josh Sharp: ta-da! – Soho Theatre, London

  • Krapp’s Last Tape

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

    Going to see a Samuel Beckett play, there is a certain expectation: no loud costumes, wild plots, or pelting gags. Audiences strap in, sharpen their senses, and prepare to notice every small detail and stylistic choice. This one-off production of Krapp’s Last Tape at Stanley Arts Centre, followed by a short Q&A with David Westhead, who plays Krapp, and director Stockard Channing, is classically Beckettian: brief, unceremonious, and reveling in simple foolishness.

    The Stanley Arts hall is vast: high ceiling, with rows of chairs surrounding a very small, cluttered stage. At its centre sits a table for Krapp, strewn with unravelled spools of tape. There is a particular tension in a room that is both so quiet and so full — so many people and objects poised to disturb the stillness. I wanted to click my pen to take notes, but even that might have drawn attention.

    Despite the scale of the auditorium, actor Westhead has an uncanny ability to make it feel as though he is entirely alone. Surrounded by silent faces, he never acknowledges others overtly, yet remains fully expressive. With his mouth slightly open and chin raised, he averts his gaze from the tape as he listens, as though the younger voice were emerging from his own mind rather than a machine. He follows Beckett’s stage directions with almost computer-like precision.

    It is striking to watch a performance governed by such tightly coded instructions in the age of AI, and stranger still how human and natural it feels — a humanity encoded by a man writing sixty-eight years ago. This is a testament to Westhead’s skill as an actor, making memorised movements appear instinctive. During the Q&A, an audience member asks how he makes the character feel so authentic. He responds that the experiences described in the play — parental loss, the loss of love — are things most people encounter at some point. Beneath the rigidity of Beckett’s form lie emotions the actor cannot help but infuse with humanity.

    Replication and repetition are, of course, central to the play. The tape is replayed; memories are replayed. Some moments Krapp chooses to skip, others he returns to. Each memory is recontextualised by how long he allows himself to sit with it, or avoid it altogether. Where he is most enthusiastic in youth, he is most dismissive in old age. The embarrassment of hearing his past overzealous happiness is consistently funny. His indulgence in memories of a lost lover is equally amusing.

    There is a concerted effort to keep the production brief. Within Beckett’s stage directions, Channing has chosen not to stretch the timeline. Where some productions of Krapp’s Last Tape run over an hour, this one comes in at just under forty-three minutes — a remarkably precise figure. In the post-show Q&A, Westhead treats Beckett’s esteemed text with humorous lightness rather than reverence, joking that he hoped no one had spent more than twenty pounds to see it — they hadn’t. Though clearly enamoured with the production, he still calls it “a bit of tut”: a very Beckettian attitude. There is no grandiosity here, only careful attention to detail.

    Before asking their questions, a couple of audience members mention being local, expressing a delighted bemusement at having come to South East London for this one-off performance. Westhead responds by listing a handful of other, equally unexpected and understated locations the production will visit next. Despite Beckett’s status as a revered literary figure, this production maintains his desire for humility.

    Directed by Stockard Channing

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Krapp’s Last Tape, Stanley Arts Centre

  • The League of Improv

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

    The League of Improv returns for another monthly show, part of an ongoing series in which a guest stand-up comedian — on this occasion Morgan Rees — effectively emcees the night. Rees chats to audience members, extracting information and jokes, which the improvisers then use as the basis for a series of short improvised sketches. It is a fun night that involves everyone.

    The Phoenix Arts Club provides the perfect casual setting: a long room with tables and sofas stretching all the way back, where people can get up to go to the bar, drift in and out, and where even the bar staff are watching and laughing.

    On this night in particular, everything seemed to fall into place for the League. Rees is excellent in his role: his charm is the glue that holds the night together. He is able to get something amusing even from those who make it very clear they don’t want to be talked to, and this always feels cheeky rather than mean.

    Tonight’s audience also plays a huge part in the success of the evening. The classic crowd-work question “What do you do for a living?” is enough to make a regular stand-up-goer mentally switch off, but here it produces some juicy answers. There’s a man who works in an all-male sex club, a manager on a construction site, and — if you’re collecting evil jobs — someone from Thames Water! Another even announces that he “makes vapes for teenagers”; he doesn’t vape himself.

    Rees even speaks to my plus one. When asked what she does, she explains that she’s a print designer for women’s fashion. When he asks whether we’d know her work, she replies, “well… if you know, you’d know.” Rees amusingly takes offence at the implication that he wouldn’t, and from there the phrase takes on a life of its own. It generates a huge laugh when repeated by one of the improvisers in a sketch about trying to trademark “puma print” — so just black — and becomes an unofficial slogan for the evening, resurfacing when two other audience members repeat it under Rees’s questioning.

    This speaks to how funny the audience members themselves are, and how much they help to propel the night forward. The building-site manager provides a strong callback to an earlier sketch about HR telling a couple they couldn’t kiss at their own wedding, by explaining that he does allow people to kiss at his place of work. This sparks a very funny scene about a man being hopelessly misled by his HR manager about who he is and isn’t allowed to kiss at work.

    Using real audience stories as the foundation for the scenes is a smart choice. It means the show never asks you to suspend your disbelief too much: even when things get wacky, they remain anchored to something real that happened in the room.

    All the improvisers in the group are skilled, some particularly so. The improvised scenes rarely drag, and even when a scene becomes a little lost or confused, the performers embrace and acknowledge the chaos. However, improv is by nature hit and miss, and while some of the strongest material arrives later in the evening, the show does feel a little long at two hours including an interval. They just about pull it off, though, ending on a high with a sketch built around a manager and employee in the audience who are both named David, resulting in a workplace where everyone is called David. It is a neat way to close the evening, allowing for a wealth of callbacks to moments from throughout the show.

    Devised by The League of Improv

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: The League of Improv, Phoenix Arts Centre

  • Strategic Love Play

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

    At LAMDA’s Carne Theatre, director Dhruv Ravi takes on  Strategic Love Play, a new play by Miriam Battye. It follows a date between Man or Adam (Emmanuel Olusanya) and Woman or Jenny (Amber Grappy), arranged through an app, that goes… very strangely. The play feels distinctly of the moment: its characters are scarily real, it’s funny, and it’s always buoyed by a tension that reveals the evening for what it really is — a horror show. The stage is set like a pub, in the round, with several tables surrounding the table where the couple is seated. My plus-one and I are given one of them. It’s immersive and very close.

    Adam just wants a normal evening. Jenny is a massive spanner in the works. She manipulates him relentlessly — instigating arguments, dragging him into intense conversations, oscillating between flirtation and tears — until she finally runs off after an emotional crash, exhausted by herself. While the play could be read as two complex characters navigating an awkward date, Jenny is always one step ahead, exploiting Adam’s desire to say and do the right thing. He begins the evening half-committed, jacket still hanging on his shoulder, and by the end is left alone, crying from shock before laughing as realisation hits that the nightmare is over.

    Grappy brings Jenny’s overwhelming dominance to life with total commitment. What initially comes across as overacting soon clarifies into a character who treats life like a poem or a play, desperate to manufacture a “moment.” We learn little about Jenny’s life, yet her behaviour is entirely legible: a fantasist prone to poetic, self-victimising monologues, longing for intimacy without the capacity to sustain it. Her attempts to create a dark, cinematic romance spiral beyond her control, so that in the end she frightens herself, and once her emotional fuel is spent, she shuts off completely.

    Opposite her, Olusanya is the perfect likeable, awkward antidote. His terrified reactions earn early laughs, grounding the play in recognisable discomfort and counterbalancing Jenny’s volatility. We learn far more about his life than we do hers: a girlfriend who left, and a best friend he might have been in a relationship with, had he not sent a disturbing drunken voice note. In many ways, the play is really about him, with Jenny a whirlwind he narrowly avoids being pulled into. He is alone before she arrives, and still there once she is gone; briefly enthralled, then left standing as the vortex passes.

    This is a situation that could only exist in the age of dating apps: a cold open with no shared history, no gradual reading of temperament, no social context to soften the encounter, just two strangers with their own expectations of what a first date will be like.

    Ravi and his team build an impressive rollercoaster from a table, two chairs, and two people. Ghoti Fisher’s fluctuating lighting makes the emotional shifts vividly palpable; by the end, spotlights isolate each table, including the one where Adam is left alone. Veila De Nicola’s subtle sound design, distant noise and understated music bleed into the scene, heightening the intensity and quietly reminding us of the walls around the date and the world continuing just beyond it.

    In this dark dating tale that rings uncomfortably true, audiences will recognise the awkwardness, the anxiety and the craving for stability. When Jenny talks about wanting a “badge” to confirm she’s in a relationship, and Adam eagerly replies, “I want a badge too!”, the room erupts. But the play’s message is clear: a relationship is not a badge, or an anchor, or a stable structure, but is made from people, each with their own problems and circumstances, working within their limits.  

    Directed by Dhruv Ravi
    Movement and intimacy director: Kim Wright
    Produced and costume design by Enza Kim
    Lighting design by Ghoti Fisher
    Sound design by Veila De Nicola

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Strategic Love Play, LAMDA

  • Sixty Minutes of Comedy

    Can A Comedian Carry It Alone?

    I set out this year wanting to see live comedy. Comedy of any kind. Along the way I encountered a wide variety of performers: different ages, from different countries, all with different performance backgrounds and levels of experience. However, most of them turned out to be solo, hour-long performances in some capacity. Sometimes that meant straight stand-up, sometimes a narrative one-woman show or maybe a one-man cabaret. And sometimes the category was hard to define at all, beyond being an hour of comedy by a single writer-performer.

    Given how central the hour-long solo show is to the comedy world, it is actually quite a tall order: a single person talking for an hour with the explicit aim of making you laugh. In October, I saw Tom Rosenthal’s stand-up hour Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am, a show largely concerned with longevity as an artist. He jokes about the strain of sustaining comedy over time, and about how unbearable it would be to be around someone who was funny 24/7 – our stomachs aching, our jaws in agony, desperate for relief. It is an absurd exaggeration, but it highlights a real problem with the hour show: it is a long time to laugh consistently.

    Which is why solo comedy shows have to be more than just funny. Alongside the jokes must come other qualities: interest, likeability, sweetness, visual pleasure, emotional texture, even moments of genuine thoughtfulness. A sound structure is vital if a show is not to run out of steam after ten minutes.

    One of the most experienced writer-performers I was lucky enough to review this year was Carl Donnelly, in his tour show Another Round at Leicester Square Theatre. He is clearly well versed in structuring a balanced hour. The opening is tightly packed with jokes, before loosening into something more narrative-driven once the audience is warmed up. It is the pacing of someone who knows when an audience needs momentum and when it is safe to let a story breathe.

    Another strong stand-up hour at Leicester Square Theatre came from Josh Jones with I Haven’t Won the Lottery So Here’s Another Tour Show, though it drew criticism for being slightly insubstantial. That feels harsh, as the hour contained excellent jokes and engaging stories, but it was held back by a lack of organisation. With a clearer structure, the same material could have been shaped into something more cohesive, giving the show that sense of completeness.

    A work-in-progress show from Jin Hao Li was inevitably looser but framed in a much more casual way. He spoke to the audience before the show officially began as well as afterwards, and the hour was held together by his persona, which prompted almost as many “awhs” as laughs. He engaged us with sweetness as well as humour, and that quality felt just as important. To a degree, a show can be held together by charisma alone: Victor Von Plume did not appear to have a fully memorised script, yet the performance cohered through charm and presence.

    Some of the most successful one-person shows I’ve seen this year solved the problem of endurance through sheer richness. Alice Cockayne’s Licensed. Professional. Trained. Qualified. was a standout, not because it chased joke density, but because there was always something new happening. Cockayne plays six distinct characters, each with their own story, physicality and costume, and even her outfit changes were folded into the world of the show. Her energy never dipped, and crucially, the show did not rely on the audience to sustain it through laughter alone. We were energised by her, rather than the other way around.

    Story is another anchor for many solo shows, particularly those billed as plays rather than stand-up. Michael Rosen’s double-bill Getting Through It does not describe itself as comedy, yet it drew almost as many laughs as some stand-up sets, despite its heavy themes. The humour emerges organically from a piece that is deeply wise and beautifully told, the laughs feeling like a by-product of attention rather than the goal.

    In other cases, story rescues shows that might otherwise feel slight. Laughing Matters by Alec Watson and Karen by Sarah Cameron West are both anchored by narrative, using plot to give shape and purpose to their humour.

    Then there are shows held together by theme. Sameera Bhalotra Bowers’ What Is Going On? at  Etcetera Theatre takes the premise that academic reasoning is largely useless in real-life situations and spins it into a full-length, highly visual piece, incorporating segments with puppets and PowerPoint.

    There are clear benefits for both emerging and established performers in making a solo hour. In a comedy culture built around touring and festivals, sixty minutes justifies a ticket price, does not rely on other performers, and allows audiences time to properly get to know a comedian. It is also a chance to demonstrate range. The strongest shows I saw this year prove how the hour can become more than a string of jokes or an endurance exercise. Comedians can choose who they want to be onstage, and what drives their style – whether that is energy, tight narrative control, or casual charm. I am looking forward to seeing what this structure offers next in 2026: how new comedians reinvent the hour, and how established ones continue to squeeze more out of it.

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Feature: Sixty Minutes of Comedy

  • Twelfth Night

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

    Even in comedies, jokes are often treated as decoration rather than substance – meant to entertain while pointing to deeper themes. But the RSC’s new production of Twelfth Night, directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah, doesn’t shy away from a focus on fun. Devoting more time to clowning and the comedic subplot – in which Olivia’s uncle Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek trick the uptight Malvolio into believing Olivia loves him – Puwanarajah creates a unique production that draws attention to different types of fools, how they operate, and highlights the tragedy that exists as an equal and opposite force to comedy.

    Michael Grady-Hall’s Feste is the likeable, highly trained clown: ridiculous in a polished way, funny through skill and control rather than earnest clumsiness. He sings, juggles, and commands a crowd, performing choreographed routines that are genuinely beautiful. A rope dropped from the ceiling is pulled to black out the stage; in the interval, he throws balls into the audience; and at the end of ‘The Rain It Raineth Every Day’, when he blows out the spotlight, we see the delicate side of the professional fool.

    Edward Gorey-inspired design by James Cotterill gives the clowning heightened intricacy. The minimal greyscale lighting opens up the stage, revealing the back curtain, which emphasises the fragility of his body within the huge  Barbican Theatre. In mid-air, Grady-Hall skilfully walks the tightrope between safety and disaster.

    Samuel West’s incredibly funny Malvolio is the real fool however, and the character who makes us laugh most. His foolishness is raw and untrained, with clumsy physicality and famous yellow stockings. Feste’s ruffled yellow-and-black outfit, complete with banana codpiece, almost looks good compared to Malvolio’s disastrous ensemble. When he appears above the stage, gazing down at Olivia (Freema Agyeman) with wildly misplaced confidence, the audience begins to laugh hard. West’s nasal voice is a perfect comic instrument: his off-beat command of his sounds shines when he studies the forged letter and insists he sees Olivia’s handwriting, her “c’s, her u’s, and her t’s!”.

    Music plays a massive part in how we are pulled through the production. An original score by Matt Maltese oscillates between melancholy, soulful tunes and vaudeville-like playful numbers. A vast organ made of oversized pipes looms centrestage, around which the characters whirl like clockwork figures inside a music box, executing slapstick ensemble scenes with orchestral precision.

    Joplin Sibtain as Sir Toby Belch and Demetri Goritsas as Sir Andrew Aguecheek form the dynamic duo at the centre of the carousel of foolish side characters. They generate plenty of laughter, but their dominance within the group deepens the audience’s sympathy for Malvolio. Puwanarajah claims that Twelfth Night contains some of Shakespeare’s funniest and saddest moments and here there’s an equally tragic payoff to Malvolio’s hilarious fate: when he is socially ostracised, the moment lands with force, and we feel almost complicit for laughing along.

    By focusing strongly on clowning and comedy, the production slightly downplays romantic threads, particularly between Orsino (Daniel Monks) and Viola as Cesario (Gwyneth Keyworth). This shifts emphasis away from jokes where the punchline is subversion of gender roles, which could feel less titillating in our contemporary society where the idea of the feminine encroaching on the masculine is less exhilarating.

    Weighting Twelfth Night as Puwanarajah does is a daring move, one that risks making the production appear somewhat superficial. The significance of plot and subplots are almost reversed, yet this choice reveals just how rich the comedic subplot is when given focus. It is not only an entertaining and visually impactful spectacle, but also a worthwhile investigation into where and how fun arises within one of Shakespeare’s most comically charged plays.

    Directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah
    Set and Costume Design by James Cotterill
    Lighting design by Zoe Spurr and Bethany Gupwell
    Composed by Matt Maltese
    Sound Design by George Dennis
    Produced by Holly Reiss

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Twelfth Night, Barbican Theatre

  • One Woman And Her Bitch

    Rating: 2 out of 5.

    So many comedy plays rely on oddness as their engine, but this kind of humour is far harder to execute than it appears. Surreal jokes need to feel genuinely strange — surprising, even dark and a bit disturbing. When the oddness isn’t odd enough, or the darkness not quite dark enough, or the ideas not substantial enough, the result risks feeling less like well-crafted absurdist comedy and more like adults playing.

    One Woman and Her Bitch is designed to be chaotic, provocative, and purposefully weird. Yet it often lands somewhere between a bit much and not quite enough.

    Written by William Lyons — a philosopher and academic specialising in the “theatre of the mind” — the play mixes classical Greek comedy, panto, modern political and cultural commentary, and nods to Beckett and Brecht. It is set in a version of London where painted landmarks sit alongside hand-drawn columns of ancient Greece, creating a liminal world that blurs the classical and the contemporary. This hybrid setting is one of the production’s most successful elements, subtly linking the mundanity of the present with the richness of mythic history and dissolving the hierarchy between them. Even the characters’ names reinforce this connection: Diogeneia (Katrin Mellinger), shortened to “Dodgey,” and her dog Cerberus (Emma Wilkes) level the streets of London with classical myth.

    The central issue with the play is that its comic engine never really ignites. Much of the humour rests on the dynamic between the human–dog double act, and while there is a Beckettian symbiosis to their relationship, the affection they’re meant to share never fully reaches the audience. This is partly because the characterisations drift into discomfort: Cerberus’s animalistic behaviours — licking, biting, twitching are a bit unnerving, and Diogeneia’s occasional growling only heightens the awkwardness. The cast also don’t quite have the timing needed to lift the subtler jokes.

    Even the attempts at harsher or more provocative comedy tend to misfire. Whenever other characters call Cerberus a dog, she insists on being called a “bitch,” a running gag that seems designed to revel in crudity but never feels especially daring or transgressive — just a bit uncomfortable. The costumes are visually quite challenging: latex yellow pants layered over tartan tights and the peculiar dog outfit create an aesthetic that feels confrontational within the confines of a small venue.

    The disconnect between cast and audience especially scuppers the show’s panto ambitions. Attempts at participation — including a plea for suggestions of different types of working dogs — fizzle out so that the performers end up answering their own questions. The interactive element isn’t established early enough for spectators to feel invited into the game, and by the time participation is requested, the cumulative effect of so many jokes failing to land has left the room too hesitant to respond.

    A handful of songs punctuate the show, including ‘Give A Bitch A Bone’ and a closing lullaby lamenting humanity’s destruction of the world. These musical moments gesture toward deeper thematic intentions, yet they never quite develop into anything substantial. The production also brushes against the criminalisation of homelessness — most notably in Dodgey’s eventual arrest for vagrancy — but these instances remain fleeting, offering allusion rather than insight.

    Despite an admirable effort, particularly given a last-minute cast change, the show’s intentional strangeness too often veers into incoherence, overshadowing both comic payoff and philosophical ambition. For a production built on big ideas and bold absurdity, One Woman and Her Bitch ultimately becomes a bizarre blur of half-formed concepts.

    Written by William Lyons
    Directed by Victor Sobchak

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: One Woman And Her Bitch, Etcetera Theatre