Rosie Wood
Reviews | Opinion | Interviews
Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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‘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…
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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…
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Most interactive comedy asks the audience to participate. London Clown Festival’s character sketch show Do All The Thingsasks them to collaborate. The show is like being invited over by your crazy aunts for an afternoon of good old-fashioned fun. Amid a jam-packed hour of character sketches, Abigail Dooley and Emma Joy Edwards of A&E Comedy find time for dancing, a conga line, compliments,…
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Clowns are usually brash creatures. They revel in noise, disruption and the grotesque. Usually. Lucy Ellis’s Moonkid brings a gentler kind of cartoon to the London Clown Festival. Her parade of characters possesses an unusual serenity: a wandering moon, a nun absorbed in prayer, a gliding would-be poet and a wilderness safety guide sweeping the darkness with his…
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The P Word is like a Hollywood movie in theatre. This Olivier Award-winning romance tackles massive real world problems: the asylum system in the UK, LGBT+ persecution abroad, racism within the gay community, and internalised racism, all while pulling us through an absorbing, unlikely love story. It tells that story in the best way: making it…
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Just a few years ago, a play about an AI-powered robotic girlfriend would have felt like pure science fiction. Now, with people using AI as therapists or even claiming to fall in love with ChatGPT, Zoe.exe feels much closer to social commentary. Jo (Rachel Duncan) has recently broken up with her girlfriend Zoe (Rhiannon Lucy…
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HOTDAWWG feels like stepping inside a low-budget arcade game that has somehow become sentient. The show turns the repetitive logic of a cooking simulator — something like Papa’s Pizzeria or Hot Doggeria — into live clown theatre, trapping its characters inside a loop of service smiles, panic and absurd labour. It is slight, strange and meticulously controlled. At the centre…
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Joe Haddad is a Palestinian, Catholic stand-up comedian who grew up in South London. There could hardly be a more relevant voice at the Peckham Fringe — an arts festival that values showcasing emerging local talent and cultural diversity. After being cautious about revealing his Palestinian background to those around him for years, here he is…
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Even as improv shows go, this one is especially casual. It is hosted by show creator Brad Collett in a conversational style, with him and performers Beri Kahane and Richard Delroy veiled behind a pretty non-existent fourth wall. It is essentially just a fun hour of improv games without a theme or thread. There are lots of different formats, which add…
Rosie Wood 