Rosie Wood

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  • The Death of the Flyer? How Social Media Is Bringing in the Crowd at Edinburgh Fringe

    I took my first show to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. As my comedy partner and I wrote the show, booked the accommodation and train tickets, and decided who would have the pleasure of carrying around the projector, we chatted relentlessly about what a great time we were going to have and how excited we were to perform. But when we arrived at the venue, it dawned on us: that’s a lot of chairs. Who the hell is going to come? Every day, we hit Cowgate and the Royal Mile with our flyers, only to ask our medium-sized audience afterwards whether anyone had come because we’d flyered them. Barely anyone had. Most had found us through the online Fringe Programme or seen us perform on one of the festival’s many mixed-bill showcases.
    There is growing anxiety among Fringe performers about the future of festivals and traditional routes into comedy. Rising costs, low attendance and the closure of staple Fringe media outlets like Fest are all weighing on aspiring performers. It can be frustrating to constantly hear that things are not as they once were, and easy to feel that there is no realistic way in anymore. It left me wondering whether new, experimental comedians could still create a real buzz around a show. Surely, where there’s a will, there’s a way.
    This year, a duo of newer comedians, Gabriel Madden and Daniel Trengove, also known as Dos Leches, seemed to have done just that with their show Rhino Conservation Erotic Novel. When I spoke to them, they admitted they had “expected it to be harder”. In fact, Trengove said, “it couldn’t have been any easier”. At the word “easy”, my ears pricked up. I had to know more.

    “We did almost no flyering,” Madden tells me, and they didn’t spend any money on advertising. Instead, the pair filmed a short sketch for Instagram Reels and TikTok in which they offered pensioners kisses (tongue optional), while holding a giant sign. The video amassed an astonishing 5.7 million views on Instagram. At a festival where thousands of performers compete for attention, those numbers translated into real audiences. Furthermore, their advertising wasn’t just free; it had the potential to make them money. Dos Leches sold out ten of their shows, with strong attendance on other days. They estimate that their audience came “90% from Instagram, 5% from TikTok and 5% word of mouth”.

    Edinburgh was not the first festival to host Rhino Conservation Erotic Novel. Trengove recalls performing it at Leicester Comedy Festival to seven people. “It was terrible,” they laugh. In the run-up to Edinburgh, getting people to attend their work-in-progress shows had been a constant source of stress. They were repeatedly asking the same family and friends to come along. At one point, Madden tells me, “I was going to house parties and trying to sell people tickets to the show.”
    Madden says that, although the pair had already found some success on the traditional stand-up circuit, it had not necessarily translated into opportunities. “Without social media it would have taken us like three more years to get where we are now.”
    Theirs is very much a social media success story. But it also raises a bigger question about the future of live comedy. As Trengove puts it: “If you don’t have social media or money, I don’t know how you’d do it.”
    And it’s not just younger comedians who are reaping the benefits of social media. Andy Field has had a Radio 1 comedy show, performed on television and succeeded in major competitions such as the BBC New Comedy Awards. Yet he has also recently made the decision to start producing content. His Instagram following now stands at around 104,000, largely built through his series Drawing a Horse Every Day Until I’m Really Good at Drawing Horses.
    We discussed his 2026 Edinburgh show, Andy Field: Giddy Up. Like Madden and Trengove, Field tells me, “I didn’t flyer at all.” He had some flyers printed, but only “just to not upset the venue”. It is almost as though printing them has become an outdated school rule: something you are expected to do, whether or not it makes a difference.

    “Flyering feels a bit like community service,” he says. “Seeing young comedians flyering on the side of the Mile – it feels like a rite of passage for them… people like to feel busy.” Expending energy shouting about your show can feel productive, even if it doesn’t necessarily sell tickets.
    Flyering is undoubtedly part of the trademark Edinburgh Fringe atmosphere. Yet if it produces few tangible results, perhaps its purpose has become as much about performing the role of a Fringe comedian as selling tickets. Awkward comedians roam the streets alongside overconfident a cappella performers, and the strange encounters and embarrassing pitches have become part of the festival itself. Field made a successful and hilarious video, An A-Z of Flyering Pitches, a sort of Fringe inside joke parodying these often absurd pitches. The act of flyering, with all its social discomfort, has become comedy in its own right: content to be shared online.
    Madden and Trengove’s experience also suggests that picking up audience members on the street is not necessarily the best way to find a crowd receptive to your comedy. On the one occasion they successfully attracted an audience through flyering, they found it produced their worst show. These audience members hadn’t discovered them through their videos or developed an interest in their comedy beforehand. Madden describes them as “nutcases”, “the sort of people that go up to Scotland without any plans”.
    For Field, the benefits of social media extend beyond ticket sales. He has noticed that audiences respond differently to his live comedy since building a following online.
    “Doing social media makes the live shows better,” he tells me. “People laugh harder because they know you and it’s you saying the funny thing.”
    It is like hearing something from a friend rather than a stranger whose sense of humour you have yet to understand. Field describes this as a symptom of building a “parasocial relationship” with your followers. Trengove makes a similar observation: “You don’t have to do those icebreakers, you go in with straight water.”
    Social media can also cut out the middleman between performers and the public. Field argues that it allows comedians to establish a public identity and give people an understanding of their work “without having to appear on Mock the Week twelve times.” Performers no longer necessarily need the approval of major broadcasters or traditional media institutions to find an audience.
    Alastair Clark offers a different perspective. His show, Alastair Clark: On the Record, managed to achieve an excellent run without enormous numbers on Instagram or TikTok. It played at the very same venue as ours, just an hour earlier. As we arrived each day, huge queues of people spilled out of the venue, audience members full of praise and buying tote bags. Clark tells me that “this year’s Fringe was great on every metric”. He had surpassed his previous achievements in audience numbers, reviews and industry connections.

    When I ask him how he did it, the answer seems to lie in a combination of quality and hard work. Clark has been performing his own shows at the Fringe since 2011. He performed On the Record at the Fringe in 2025 before touring it around UK record shops this year, a run covered by Chortle. By the time he returned to Edinburgh, the show had already built an audience and gained momentum.

    Clark has also found a particular niche to tap into: record enthusiasts and music fans. Rather than relying entirely on people stumbling across his work, he has cultivated an audience that can follow him from one performance to the next through a mailing list. Traditional reviews have also played a part. “I got a really good review from the Scotsman early doors,” he says.
    But even Clark has noticed that traditional methods of promotion are becoming less effective.
    “I think the difficulty is flyering is getting less potent,” he tells me. Accommodation in Edinburgh has become so expensive that audiences do not stay as long. The turnover of visitors is faster, leaving people with less time to wander between shows. The spontaneity that once defined the Fringe is becoming harder to maintain. His insights make me wonder whether someone starting out today could still build a following on the ground.
    He remembers a time when it was possible to do the Fringe without even being listed in the official programme. Flyering and the PBH Free Fringe’s catalogue, The Wee Blue Book, could be enough to bring people through the door.
    Perhaps a social media following is the missing piece. If you can build one. But that possibility comes with its own uncertainty. Not everyone will go viral, and an online following is no guarantee of a successful live show. Madden argues that comedians should learn to perform live before focusing on social media. Some online performers, he says, struggle to translate their success to the stage, whereas he rarely sees the reverse happen.
    There is also the question of what motivates performers in the first place. Madden and Trengove tell me that they love making videos, and that their success is a welcome side effect. Clark is a live performer who wants to make his own shows and tour them. For Field, the original attraction of stand-up was that “ideas are your currency”, wherever they are showcased.
    Maybe the answer isn’t to choose between the street and the screen, but to find a way for the two to work together. I think it’s safe to say I’ll be trying to get on social media before Fringe 2027.

    Published with ArtCultureUK

    The Death of the Flyer? How Social Media Is Bringing in the Crowd at Edinburgh Fringe

  • Garry Starr: Classic Penguins

    Rating: 5 out of 5.

    Classical music blares as the audience enter The Other Palace’s steep circle of seats. In the middle of the stage, smoke rises from a chair turned away from us: the calm before the storm. The chair turns, revealing Damien Warren-Smith’s alter ego, Garry Starr.

    He’s naked.

    Starr does wear flippers, a ruff and a tailcoat, like the gentlemanly emperor penguin on the Penguin Books logo, but none of it covers anything. Full-frontal nudity is often the grand finale of an outrageous clown show, but here, it’s just the beginning.

    He waddles over to a bookshelf housing a collection of Penguin Classics signature orange paperbacks. His mission is to perform each one, devising a clowning routine inspired by its title. He takes a book and places it under a camera so we can see it on a large screen behind him. The titles provide the kind of punchy, intriguing hooks that might tempt a reader to pull a book from the shelf, but here they become prompts for clowning games. Is there much that’s literary about it? No. There’s nothing pretentious about these routines, with most of the titles taken entirely at face value. Once he’s finished with each book, he slaps it down on the floor, quite unceremoniously, and pulls out another, until a messy pile accumulates onstage — almost as if he’s discarding the books’ actual contents after enjoying himself playing around with their titles.

    The routines rarely exist in isolation. One title becomes the punchline to the previous routine and the setup for the next, giving each new book the feeling of a reveal. The stunts grow progressively more daring, difficult and entertaining, building momentum as the pile of discarded paperbacks grows.

    You might think that in a show that begins with nudity you’d stop noticing it after half an hour. But Warren-Smith doesn’t let us forget. Just as you think you’ve grown accustomed to it, he presents himself from a completely new angle — or from “Wuthering Heights”. The comic and dramatic tension often comes down to how close his naked body is going to get to us, and how readily we can be encouraged to join in with his anarchic behaviour. Nothing is off limits, from Holding the Man to Body Surfers — without giving away any spoilers.

    As the show progresses, Warren-Smith tears down every social convention in the book, all while ensuring everyone is having a good time. Although the audience becomes slightly more apprehensive about joining in, willing volunteers never completely dry up. With his charisma and ability to rewrite all the rules of the room, he could be a cult leader.

    And tonight, he has a wealth of excellent volunteers to draw from. The Other Palace seems to be full of drama students and actors. The woman who gets up to participate in the Grapes of Wrath routine is hilarious, throwing herself into the spirit of the rebellious food fight.

    The soundtrack is equally integral to the show’s success. Warren-Smith’s cheeky back-and-forth with the sound technician breaks the fourth wall and adds to the spirited chaos. He delivers his own trickster-esque renditions of everything from the wistful film theme ‘Moon River’ (you can guess where that one goes) to cheesy pop songs such as James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’.

    When you leave the theatre and see people keeping to themselves on the top deck of a bus, wrapped in bundles of coats, the sheer strangeness of the experience you’ve just witnessed really hits you. This is maximalist clowning. You forgive any use of shock tactics because Warren-Smith commits wholeheartedly to his genre, delivering a madcap show that is more than a performance: it’s an experience — the full package.

    Written by Damien Warren-Smith
    Directed by Cal McCrystal
    Lighting design by Lily Dawford
    Produced by Francesca Moody

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Garry Starr: Classic Penguins, The Other Palace

  • Maya Ricote: Ay Am!

    Rating: 3 out of 5.

    Massive balloons for her bum and boobs, and nipples that look like they’d have your eye out: Maya Ricote is a larger-than-life, cryogenically frozen, cellulite-free, 25-year-old telenovela actress. A clown. She emerges from a freezer, having last seen the light of day in 1930, and sets about trying to secure an acting job. Will she be a star? Or will she be a normal, uninteresting, un-famous person? Just like us! The plot of the hour-long piece really doesn’t have anything more to it than that. A woman, a phone and a contract.

    Clown shows don’t necessarily need much of a narrative beyond a sustained commitment to silliness, but Ay Am! occasionally feels repetitive and thin. There is plenty of overdramatised sighing, posing and repeated references to her “body”, all of which raises a laugh, but it begins to feel a little drawn out. This is not to say that the premise and comic building blocks of the show are not firmly in place, just that a denser clowning routine and higher gag rate would really pump it up even more.

    Much of the clowning centres on the fundamental strangeness of acting. Ricote rushes to put on and remove a cap as she switches between playing cab driver Tony and herself, looking almost like a child talking to herself as she immerses herself in her own make-believe world; completely unaware, and entirely unbothered, by how unconvincing it looks. There is also something distinctly clownish in the way she makes the body itself awkward. She makes us hyper-aware of the performer consciously telling their body what to do: a gesture becomes too deliberate, a walk too exaggerated, a facial expression held just slightly too long. Ricote’s body seems like an unruly object that has to be instructed into performing. She is particularly distressed by her inability to cry on cue. The joke, of course, is that she can cry; she can cry perfectly well about not being able to cry. Acting requires the performer to manufacture real emotions, creating an inherently ridiculous collision between sincerity and pretence.

    Ricote’s own acting experience seems to feed directly into this material. We see her younger self performing in a telenovela, accompanied by brilliantly observed colloquial English subtitles. The scenes capture the gloriously coarse acting and heightened scripts characteristic of the genre, and given Ricote’s background in it, it is no surprise that she finds such rich comic potential in the very idea of acting. Ricote has the perfect source material for clowning, which is a genre already built on exaggerated emotion and spectacularly artificial performances. You just wish the show would push the joke further.

    She has great fun with her audience, however. At one point she asks for suggestions of things she can act out, and one audience member — naming no names, let’s call them RuPaul’s Drag Race UK series 2 contestant Bimini Bon-Boulash — offers “gardener”. “Gardening?” Ricote replies. “Because I am Latina?” It’s a wonderfully quick example of the show’s willingness to let the audience feed its strange, constantly mutating comic logic.

    Then, in the final minutes, Ay Am! takes a startling turn. The balloons are popped and the red dress comes off. Ricote scrambles around the stage, stripped of the exaggerated body, shaking two small lights as she gallops around like some kind of terrifying little spirit performing a midnight ritual. The naked figure that emerges feels less like liberation than the scary little creature within who has been desperate all along to be seen, admired and desired. After an hour spent constructing increasingly ridiculous versions of herself for an audience, this is the most revealing one of all. st revealing one of all.

    Written by Maya Ricote and Dan Lees
    Directed by Dan Lees

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Maya Ricote: Ay Am!, Soho Theatre

  • Rhino Conservation Erotic Novel

    Rating: 5 out of 5.

    From the moment performers Daniel Trengove and Gabriel Madden appear on stage in dazzling sequinned shirts with wide-eyed enthusiasm and stilted movements, their unique brand of  humour is apparent. Rhino Conservation Erotic Novel essentially takes the form of a presentation, with the sincerity of its charitable endeavour to save a dying species thinly veiling the absolute joke shop underneath.

    The pair have come up with some inventive erm… business ideas, crafted works of literature, and even “appeared on Oprah” in order to complete their mission. The show hurtles from one idea to the next with the logic of a rapid-fire cartoon. Much of the comedy sits on the border between sincerity and irony. Trengove earnestly explains the mission of their rhino conservation charity while Madden chips in with ad-libs, creating a dynamic that reminded me of the pop duo that never was, Ant and Seb, singing ‘Mysterious Girl’ on The X Factor. There’s a distinct sense of ‘that sounded really cool in my head’.

    That gap between how something looks from the outside and how it evidently feels in the moment becomes an excellent source of comic tension. Madden, for instance, feigns ignorance after being “cancelled pretty hard” following his appearance on Oprah, where he uses an affected accent. Under the sometimes extreme and grotesque scenarios is a relatable cycle of doing embarrassing things and pretending they’re not really happening. 

    They repeatedly return to this half-sincere, half-embarrassed mode. Madden solemnly reads his erotic work of fiction, May Contain Traces of Nuts, with Trengove on the Irish whistle, before the screen adaptation May Contain Traces of Rhino Nuts is staged with an audience member. Their hapless volunteer is strapped into a rhino costume and cast as ‘Gabriel the Rhino’, a flirtatious male with all kinds of tricks up his sleeve, including some questionable content that our volunteer has allegedly improvised. Trengove responds with studied minimalism as ‘Estelle the Rhino’ (named after his mother). 

    The pair also mine their own friendship for every possible awkward implication. Their noticeably tactile relationship is treated with such straight-faced seriousness that even the most innocuous interaction can feel precariously close to becoming something else. During a series of dance numbers, they seem liable to fall into the audience, or each other, at any moment. They are masters of the brink.

    They’re also remarkably good at working with the room. Audience participation never feels like too much of a gamble: they construct jokes around their volunteers while retaining a clear sense that the interaction will go somewhere. Trengove’s ‘Make It Hotter’ app, for instance, asks volunteers to be photographed. Appearing on camera could seem a step too far for an unsuspecting viewer, were it not for the confidence that an uproarious punchline awaits them.

    Rhino Conservation Erotic Novel feels genuinely fresh. Its jokes are sharp, specific and completely its own. More than that, Trengove and Madden have built a properly functioning comic engine: the tensions between the performers, the audience, and the realities of the outside world are so well established that each new idea feels like an exciting addition to an already-running joke, rather than a new premise the audience has to be persuaded to buy into. They have created a unique winning formula. 

    Created by Daniel Trengove and Gabriel Madden

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Rhino Conservation Erotic Novel, Lower Marsh Arts Club

  • Crybabies: The Scaring

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

    Fresh from a hugely successful Edinburgh Fringe run, Crybabies: The Scaring arrives at Soho Theatre with a hilarious jump scare. This Halloween sketch show, with a loose narrative, stars Michael Clarke, Ed Jones and James Gault. Although it is a high-budget production, it somehow retains the handmade charm of a Fringe show. 

    Set in a spooky hotel, complete with an ominous-sounding sauna maze, an exorcism gone wrong turns out to be part of an immersive stag experience. This sets the tone for a show that is constantly breaking through genres as well as the fourth wall, pulling us in and out of its universe at will.

    There is an impressive combination of precision acting and fast-paced chaos here. Every scene is completely slick, but there is a slight improv vibe to the whole thing, with off-the-cuff remarks and experimental jokes realised in XL glory. Dramatic lighting, life-sized dolls and Cecelia Carey’s set design all contribute to the extravaganza. With vast swathes of fabric draped over three tall walls, Carey’s set takes the DIY quality of Fringe and scales it up. The hotel proprietor even draws attention to the blank spaces in the theatre set, which we fill with our imaginations, by acknowledging that it isn’t attached to any walls. Comedy arrives to puncture the mystique of the horror show it parodies.

    The show draws attention to both the connection and the distance between the two genres. Jump scares become punchlines, highlighting the tension-building and release structure that are used by jokes and scares alike. Similar to the set, the script consistently obliterates supernatural and mysterious horror tropes with comic literalness: Gerry the ghost, played by Gault, isn’t a ghost at all; they were just ignoring him. Comedy often comes from plot holes and mistakes in speech that undermine the horror story it is spoofing, alongside a wealth of puns, gags and slapstick routines.

    Its cartoonish elements, physical comedy and stupid outfits only add to the amusing contrast between the terrifying and the absurd. It helps that Jones looks like a cartoon vampire, meant as a compliment, while Gault is not scared of a frilly crop top and short shorts. The characters are cartoonish, parodies of tropes rather than real people, which gives the whole thing a light-hearted, clowny style rather than being a serious commentary. However, they still manage to include topical references to COVID and the politically correct media. 

    The show is made up of a series of sketches, tied together with a loose narrative that sprawls around like untamed tentacles. There is no real singular core or point to the story, but that is not necessarily a problem. That bizarre mix between sketch and comedy play allows for a full-length show without the pressure to make a serious point or even really follow a proper narrative structure. Instead, it is fun, fast, high-impact and continuously unexpected.

    The Scaring has the freedom and silliness of a sketch show, but the scale to make its ridiculous ideas feel spectacular. It embraces the chaos rather than trying to contain it, allowing the show’s absurdity to become its greatest strength.

    Director: Jon Brittain 
    Set & Costume Designer: Cecilia Carey 
    Lighting Designer: Bethany Gupwell 
    Sound Designer: Ed Lewis 
    Video Designer: Nina Dunn 
    Illusions Designer: John Bulleid 
    Associate Director: Grace Duggan 
    Associate LX Designer: Jodie Underwood 
    Production Manager: Jack Boissieux 
    Stage Manager on Book: Verity Clayton

    published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Crybabies: The Scaring, Soho Theatre

  • Sara Pascoe & Friends

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

    As part of the Roundhouse Comedy Festival, Sara Pascoe & Friends is a hand-selected mixed bill, hosted by Pascoe herself. The result is a very pleasant compilation show, with a varied line-up of professional-quality comedians carrying the audience through a long show that never gets boring.

    Pascoe opens the night with crowd participation mainly about opinions on films, particularly The Odyssey, alongside getting drinks for the audience — when she asks for volunteers, a crowd of gals scream “wine”. In a huge Molly Goddard-esque pink dress, Pascoe dissects topics like movies and the internet in her own chaotic, scatterbrained style. Sometimes she can be a little hard to follow, with the combination of her unfocused style and fact-heavy deep dives. She is, however, a good compère, providing a relaxed atmosphere for the night.

    First up is Michael Odewale. He has a punchline-dense set with a relatable undercurrent of laziness. His anecdotes cover swapping bodies with a white woman on the train, being invited to a protest he can’t be arsed to go to, and the awkward transition when his once-strict parents now want to be his friends. His delivery is somewhat by-the-numbers, despite the creativity displayed in his material. In a club environment, this is probably helpful; a little more theatre is required in the theatre. He’s good enough a writer to have more fun messing with the formula.Travel Guides & Travelogues

    John Kearns is definitely a change of pace. Pascoe brings him on by saying that she loves the way his mind works. He comes on like a goblin, shaking his wig, which looks like a gigantic black scrunchie stretched across his bald head, like a bull swaying its horns. When he echoes “she loves the way my mind works,” his menacingly funny persona emerges instantly. Kearns doesn’t just talk about funny things; he is just funny to watch. He has an incredible instinct for comedic rhythm and really commits to being the clown. The actual observations he makes are also hilarious, and he brings them all to life with act-outs. He’s the only person to win both Edinburgh Fringe Best Newcomer and Best Comedy Show in its 40- year history, and you can see why. His act is interesting enough to stand completely alone.

    After seeing Harriet Kemsley all over the TV, she is exactly as you would imagine: giggly, with a lot of material on sex. She has a great eye for those embarrassing moments in life, and how the desire to impress can result in some spectacular moments of shame. There are some brilliant parallels between toddlers and grown men, and her sauna joke is a highlight. Some of the topics feel a bit tired, including material on dating apps. She must see this criticism coming a mile off, but let’s face it, chlamydia is so cliché.

    Finally, bombing in down and back from Edinburgh to be here tonight, Nina Conti comes on to warm and enthusiastic applause. Her act is so joyous and well-honed, you can’t help but love it. With the help of a dry-witted monkey puppet, she picks her participants for her famous false-mouth routine. Of course, there are a wealth of volunteers, but she really does take a lot of care selecting her final two. This time it’s a gardener and ex-pharmacist and a very elegant housewife. Conti’s routine manages to harness the joy in watching other people laugh. The woman is practically convulsing with laughter, and Conti’s high-pitched laughing over the top is impossible not to smile at.Acting & Theater

    This night shows the power of an excellent formula: fully rounded characters and an actual concept behind a set. In such a massive theatre, with high ceilings and a very mixed crowd, it’s definitely a test of comic skill, and the best moments come when comics curate an experience rather than just deliver material. However, the variety and quality tonight are top tier, with every comedian bringing something distinct and valuable.

    Published with The Reviews Hub

    Sara Pascoe & Friends – The Roundhouse, London

  • Otto & Astrid: The Stages Tour

    Rating: 3 out of 5.

    Art-rock Euro-pop sibling duo Otto & Astrid are a gleeful pastiche of underground Berlin. They take the city’s grit, eccentricity and nightlife chaos, polish away the sharp edges, and transform themselves into bubbly characters — almost as if they belong in a children’s TV series about Berlin’s alternative scene. Their new show, The Stages Tour — yes, a nod to Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour — is a greatest-hits collection from the duo’s wonderfully strange catalogue.

    Holding the show and the band together is their sibling dynamic. Older sister Astrid (Clare Bartholomew) commands the drums, resembling a tiny wind-up drummer, her arms held at right angles as she relentlessly batters the kit. Meanwhile, younger brother Otto (Daniel Tobias) brings a cheekiness and almost childlike joy to the stage, bounding around like a little techno goat in red lipstick. Every now and again, Astrid leaves the stage, tempting Otto with the opportunity to perform “unauthorised songs” — which, naturally, he does.

    Between these songs, authorised and otherwise, the pair joke, bicker and reveal snippets of their wonderfully absurd backstory. They begin life in a small rural hometown, but after their parents are ever so tragically eaten by a lion, they move into a Berlin squat. It sounds like the premise of an excellent cartoon. The songs themselves are equally quirky and surreal, from ‘Ich Bin Nicht Bin Roboter (I Am A Lion)’ to ‘Tasty Snak’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Kitten’. Lyrically, they offer playful, novelty takes on classic themes of love, power and technology.

    That childlike quality, however, creates an unusual tension with some of the show’s themes, and it is never entirely clear whether this contrast is intentional. Asking a room full of adults to rock out to what feels like Berlin Kidz Bop creates a curious tonal clash. Is this a rock  concert, or a piece of light family-style comedic entertainment? At times, the act feels caught between identities, needing to choose a direction and push it further.

    There is something undeniably pantomime about the whole affair. When Astrid commands, “No unauthorised songs!”, her wagging finger encourages us to “oh yes we are” her. Later, after the audience inevitably urges Otto to break the rules, she returns to scold us: “Look what you have done, London.” Even the crisps she hands out to the audience add to the playful theatricality. It makes for interactive fun, but it also nudges the show closer to Berlin: The Musical than the underground cult  comedy it seems to aspire to be. It feels like watching a pantomime dame and leading boy front a rock band.

    There is also a lack of direction at a structural level which causes it to lose momentum towards the end, with one too many false endings. The inter-song conversations are amusing but do little to establish where the show is heading. In this case, the German duo would throw a better party if it were a little more organised. Astrid & Otto also occasionally spend too long talking to each other rather than to the audience. They are at their strongest when they break the fourth wall, drawing the crowd into their playful rebellion.

    There is no shortage of charisma or technical skill on this stage. The show simply needs refinement, and the act needs a clearer sense of what it wants to be.

    Created by Clare Bartholomew and Daniel Tobias
    Lighting by Sam Lohs
    Directed by Clare Bartholomew
    Sound by Chris Carmichael

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Otto & Astrid: The Stages Tour, Soho Theatre

  • Thou Shalt Sit The F*** Down

    Rating: 3 out of 5.

    Few jobs require quite so much forced enthusiasm as entertaining children. Ben Everett Riley’s solo show explores what happens when the smile starts to crack. He plays Will, a veteran children’s entertainer balancing the gruelling party circuit with the emotional turbulence of life as a gay performer. The story unfolds across a series of increasingly chaotic birthday parties, loosely structured around Will’s self-written commandments for surviving the job – his own ‘thou shalts’. Binding it all together is his relationship with new recruit Fionn (pronounced Finn – RADA apparently thought the extra ‘o’ would make him more bookable): handsome, privileged and quietly dismissive of Will’s career, seeing children’s entertainment as the preserve of the failed actor.

    This is where the show is at its strongest. The dynamic between the struggling performance veteran and the ambitious newcomer offers a compelling route into the familiar theatrical territory of competition and snobbery. Solo shows built around the refrain of “I’m a failed actor, get over it” have almost become a genre in themselves, but the contrast between Will’s fading optimism and Fionn’s confidence hints at something more interesting: the search for purpose and joy in work, even when it falls short of your ambitions.

    Riley’s performance is one of the show’s strengths. He delivers the piece with a spoken-word rhythm, slipping between narration and character with confidence. The problem is that the comedy surrounding him rarely reaches the same level. Recordings of Will’s Scottish boss Karin lean into broad, almost cartoonish expression rather than naturalism, but the show never fully commits to this heightened world. Will is tightly wound and constantly anticipating disaster, yet his anxieties rarely generate the comic chaos the premise seems to promise.

    The show also occupies an uneasy space between children’s entertainment and sexual humour. Hate wanks, a groping Australian parent and skin-tight Lycra costumes that split in unfortunate places all sit very close to stories about entertaining children. The opening plays with this ambiguity, teasing what appears to be a risqué performance before revealing a superhero costume for a kids’ party. The joke lands, if somewhat predictable, but the comparison between performing for children and sexual spectacle is maybe too dark to remain tongue-in-cheek.

    Structurally, the play feels episodic, taking too long to reveal its central dramatic question and lingering heavily on scenes of sexual humour. It is only towards the end that the most compelling idea emerges: an older performer clinging to hope while grinding through difficult audiences, set against the naive certainty of someone just starting out. Had this conflict been introduced earlier and developed throughout, the show would have gained both narrative momentum and emotional weight.

    You leave entertained rather than moved. Riley is an accomplished performer with undeniable stage presence; the material simply needs a stronger comic engine and dramatic spine to match it. The characters, themes and narrative never quite deepen enough to leave a lasting impression. For a show about keeping the magic alive, it struggles to create enough of its own.

    Written by Ben Everett Riley
    Produced by Be Wry Productions

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Thou Shalt Sit The F*** Down, The Queer Comedy Club
    Review: Thou Shalt Sit The F*** Down, The Queer Comedy Club

  • James Phelan: Showman

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

    ‘The magic will work, but you must concentrate!’ is the slightly barbed energy that dominates James Phelan‘s spectacle of astounding psychological manipulation and mind-reading.

    With a finger pressed to an audience member’s forehead, he summons information directly into their mind – names, unspoken secrets, knowledge of sentimental objects from other members of the crowd. It is one of the most ambitious feats of hypnotism conceivable, built on a delicate atmosphere of trust, engagement and imagination.

    Phelan builds his world gradually, starting with a series of warm-up tricks that draw us into his logic. A card trick is framed around probability and influence, as he distracts us with mundane conversation before correctly naming the selected card. He then moves into exercises designed to engage the imagination: a magnet-like force pulling fingers together, one arm weighed down by an invisible box while the other is lifted by a balloon. From there, he escalates to his thought-summoning pièce de résistance, which begins by securing a volunteer’s feet to the floor with a few gestures and words.

    Alas, the imaginary quicksand does not take hold. The trick works only if the audience member fully commits to the illusion. We need to cooperate. 

    The interesting thing is how Phelan’s onstage persona copes with this. He begins to take on the voice of a strict teacher: if audience members don’t follow instructions, it’s our time they’re wasting. This is blended with a kind of comic cattiness, an air of‘You’d better not mess up my trick’. Traditionally, magicians project a relaxed omniscience. Phelan lets us see the desperate vulnerability underneath.

    This is slightly at odds with the much softer, more Disney-like vision of wonder that also runs through the show. He repurposes a Roald Dahl quote: “Those who believe in magic will find it,” and talks about his childhood dream of being a magician – as the nephew of Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee, it is in his blood. There’s a genuinely heartwarming moment where he asks a young boy named Logan what he wants to be when he grows up, then produces a coin engraved with the words “Logan Future Fighter Pilot.”

    The rickety moments also clash with the impenetrable fantasy world created by the show’s production design. As we enter, classic jazz standards such as ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’ play over slowed-down black-and-white projections of traditional TV entertainers. Like Phelan’s mental tricks, it encourages us to melt into another world, to let go of the nagging details of reality and believe in something more magical – but the nagging details persist.

    Nevertheless, the tricks themselves are undoubtedly incredible. The audience never tires of the mind-reading routines. In fact, they only become more compelling. You’re on the edge of your seat wondering: are they going to say my name? You hope they do.

    By the end, Phelan remarks that it has been “an eventful show”. This might be part of an extraneous comic schtick. Or maybe, on this occasion, Phelan really does lose his cool as reality threatens to topple the magical realm.

    Created by James Phelan

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: James Phelan: Showman, Underbelly Boulevard

  • Zoe Wohlfeld: Dog Funeral

    Rating: 3 out of 5.

    The title of Zoe Wohlfeld’s Dog Funeral promises exactly the kind of sweetly sinister paradox that the show delivers. It is a clown show about grief, an hour-long act of comic mourning that constantly balances the adorable against the disturbing.

    The story begins with a slideshow charting the life of Twinkle, Wohlfeld’s beloved dog. The illustrations are so sweet and lovingly rendered that they become faintly ominous. We know where this story is heading. After an act of fatal negligence involving a new boyfriend, Twinkle dies, and Wohlfeld emerges as a professional mourner of sorts, determined to process her loss in front of an audience of strangers.

    Her central character is a striking creation. With smeared make-up, gaping expressions and a childlike voice, she resembles a burnt Baby Jane or a Corpse Bride without the maggots, wandering the stage while she cries, mourns and seeks our attention. Her creepiness extends beyond the ghostly and gothic. Instead, it emerges from the childlike neediness that grief can provoke, reducing adults to creatures desperate for comfort, reassurance and affection.

    Here, loss strips away dignity. It makes us want to be noticed, soothed and loved. Wohlfeld’s clown captures this impulse perfectly. She cries, sulks, flirts and manipulates with the emotional logic of a child. The result is both funny and unsettling.

    This tension defines the show’s strongest — or worst — material. One audience member is recruited into a bizarre flirtation conducted partly through Wohlfeld’s backside. Another is sent on a mission to procure a “Pinot Gri-gee-o”. The humour comes from the absurdity of the requests, but also from the audience’s growing complicity in this strange and faintly disturbing spectacle. We laugh while simultaneously wondering whether we should be laughing at all.

    That discomfort will not be to everyone’s taste. Some may find the character’s babyish flirtatiousness grating, while others may find it genuinely unnerving. Yet the show commits so fully to its logic that resistance becomes part of the experience. Wohlfeld never winks at the audience or retreats into irony. She trusts the character completely.

    Whatever one’s feelings about these routines, there is no denying the strength of the show’s comic construction. In one sequence, audience members are instructed to repeat words fed to them by Wohlfeld, while another unfortunate punter is assigned a particularly suggestive sound. Once the pattern has been established, Wohlfeld casually inserts the phrase “my dog just died” before inviting the responses again. The laugh comes from anticipation, disbelief and the audience’s horrified recognition of what they are about to do. It is a simple mechanism executed with remarkable precision.

    That precision extends to Wohlfeld’s performance throughout. Her facial expressions are extraordinary. With mascara bleeding beneath her eyes and a mouth capable of stretching into cartoonishly tragic shapes, she creates an image that is at once ridiculous and strangely affecting. It is the kind of character that can carry an entire hour, and Wohlfeld commits to it without hesitation. Like grief itself, Dog Funeral is messy, needy and occasionally uncomfortable. It asks the audience to sit with emotions that are rarely flattering and then find ways to laugh at them. The commitment and the craft are admirable, even if the show’s more provocative impulses will not work for everyone. Nevertheless, Wohlfeld proves herself a daring clown.

    Written by Zoe Wohlfeld and Jack Grossman 
    Directed by Jack Grossman

    Published with Everything Theatre

    Review: Zoe Wohlfeld: Dog Funeral, Soho Theatre