Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
