Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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This show is everything you would imagine of character comedy: one performer, three big cartoonish personas, bumping music, and huge stage presence. But it is also exactly what you would expect from character comedy. A Berghain-born German party fiend, Häns Off; an Aussie wellness guru, The Divine Karen Moonstone; and best man and stag expert Steve Porter…
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Space Gravy is like one massive sketch — the ultimate sketch — with all the bizarre jokes connected by the story’s absurd internal logic, forming a narrative about trying to make YASA (Yorkshire Aeronautics and Space Administration) the first organisation to land on Mars. It’s performed by the trio Pat Rascal: Anisa Khorassani, Matt Blin and…
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This is one of those shows that you feel glad to have seen. A complete, precisely structured, incessantly funny 70 minutes of stand-up. What seems to begin as any other stand-up show — with funny childhood stories and tales of recent TV appearances — flows into a hyper-dense script that explores what it’s like to…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Rosie Wood 