Comedy
joe.muggs
John Cage is funny: this much we know. The deadpan prankster at the heart of 20th-century artistic experimentalism was always about the inadvertent punchline, the chuckle that comes from unexpected disjunction, the relief that comes from reminders of the absurdity of reality, as much as he was ever about any engagement with progress, technology, the transcendent. It's entirely natural, then, that Stewart Lee (pictured below), who has spent his whole career reaching outwards from the comedy circuit towards the avant-garde, should want to present his work.It was good to see Cage's work Read more ...
Veronica Lee
James Acaster: Prompt, Pleasance Courtyard *** James Acaster has certainly been studying his craft since he made his Fringe debut with an unmemorable show last year, and it shows in Prompt. Lots of comedy tropes are utilised, some of them to great effect, while others feel simply mechanical. He uses repetition, callbacks, audience participation in a show full of whimsy and the most surprising subjects for comedy.The callbacks - lots of them – join seemingly unconnected stories, such as his study into different kinds of bread, taking one's partner to a club - “like taking an apple to an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tony Law: Maximum Noonsense, The Stand Tony Law, Canadian by way of Trinidad and Tobago, has been kicking around the comedy circuit for several years with a style of madcap humour that many have delighted in but others have found self-indulgent. But with Maximum Noonsense he has retained all the free-flowing joy of his comedy while reining in some of the slacker elements. It's a marvellous concoction of silliness and sly humour.He starts with his “banter” section, wherein he ignores the women in the room and talks only to blokes about women and their weird attitudes to things such Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alfie Moore: I Predicted a Riot, Pleasance Courtyard **** There can't be many serving police officers doing stand-up comedy at the Fringe, so that makes Alfie Moore an unusual beast. Actually he's a one-off, a wonderfully engaging bloke in a sharp suit who says the most surprising things for someone currently indentured to Her Majesty. He's left-leaning, for a start, having grown up on a Sheffield council estate and who started his working life in a steelworks, where he was a shop steward. Moore, who was on Show Me the Funny on ITV last year, is now a sergeant in Humberside Constabulary Read more ...
Veronica Lee
I, Tommy, Gilded Balloon **** Everybody will be familiar with Tommy Sheridan's story, and not necessarily because they closely follow Scottish politics at their most internecine. Rather because the Glaswegian socialist went from being barely a paragraph in broadsheets to being plastered over the front pages of tabloids after a series of revelations – which he strongly denies – about visiting swingers' clubs.It was once all so different, as Rab C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison shows us in this amusing essay of Sheridan's rise and fall. The extremely charismatic Sheridan was adored by men Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tam o' Shanter, Assembly Hall ****Scottish schoolchildren are brought up on Robert Burns but other British students aren't so fortunate. We may know snatches of the great man's work – “Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie”, “O, my Luve's like a red, red rose” and so on – but few of us could recite even a stanza of Tam o' Shanter.The long poem, in Scots and English and published in 1791, tells the story of Tam, who stayed too long in an ale house and had a vision of the Devil on his ride home on his mare Meg. In Communicado Theatre's inventive musical dramatisation, devised and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jigsy, Assembly Rooms **** Les Dennis may have started his career as a comic, and then as a presenter of cheesy, family-friendly television game shows, but of late he has been plying his trade as a very decent actor. And so it proves again in Tony Staveacre's one-man play about a washed up Liverpudlian club comic.It's set in 1997 in a Liverpool working men's club, a beast that has mostly rolled over and died these days. Jigsy, florid of face and never seen on stage without a pint in his hand, does his two spots either side of the bingo. He has worked with some of the greats - Ken Dodd, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Magnus Betner, Assembly Rooms **** Here is the news: dismemberment, suicide bombers, industrial-strength Japanese porn, paedophilia and the descent of Julian Assange from hero to zero. The son of a priest and a superstar in his homeland, Swedish comic Betner is drawn to the dark stuff (come to think of it, there’s not much of a leap between Betner and bête noire), and his show latched on to the mood of post-Olympics comedown and held fast.“Show” is really the wrong word. Insisting he would rather die than do the same material every night, Betner places himself firmly as a comic outsider Read more ...
theartsdesk
Liam Mullone: A Land Fit For Fuckwits, Stand 4 **** Liam Mullone might perform his hour of clever, quietly simmering stand-up flanked by a faithful toy raccoon called Mr Eek, but there’s nothing fluffy about his material. Mullone targets knee-jerk liberalism with a steel toe-capped intellect. He takes it as read that the likes of the EDL are deeply unpleasant knuckleheads; it’s just that people who get their kicks by constantly pointing out the fact aren’t necessarily much better.Dressed in the ageless uniform of the terminally right-on bore – including copious lapel badges and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mies Julie, Assembly Hall **** Miss Julie is pretty full-on at the best of times but in Yael Farber’s striking new version, Strindberg’s themes of class and gender are given a shocking modern makeover. In transposing the action to present-day South Africa, she has written a story about the divide that still exists between the haves and have-nots, and the crippling emotional history that has yet to be overcome by the young nation.Twenty years after the end of apartheid, things haven’t changed much on a veldt farm, which is owned by a white man and whose labourers and maids are all black. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Rosie Wilby: How (Not) to Make it in Britpop, Bongo Club *** In the 1990s Rosie Wilby was lurking on the outer edges of Britpop with her band Wilby, whose giddy career highlights included opening for Tony Hadley (he evacuated the entire room for the soundcheck), being clamped outside the venue while supporting Bob Geldof, and getting their own plastic name tag in the racks of Virgin Megastore.Her band were rated “enjoyable” in a 2000 Guardian review – Wilby back-projects the proof in case we don't believe her – and the same adjective applies to this hour-long show. It’s a bit of a curate Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“One never consciously observes. The only people who consciously observe are policemen and undercover agents.” Eric Sykes, who has died at the age of 89, was the last of the great vaudevilleans. When I met him in the late 1990s, he was already totally deaf and largely blind, and somehow continued to work and remain remarkably chipper with it. He had his first ear operation in 1952, another a decade later, whereafter he wore a hearing aid camouflaged as a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. He would sometimes rub his eyes through the plane where the lenses ought to be: a sight gag if ever there was Read more ...