Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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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…
Rosie Wood 