Kemah Bob, Soho Theatre review - Thailand, massage and mental health

Kemah Bob is a regular on television and radio panel shows and well established on the comedy circuit, but Miss Fortunate is her full-length debut. And what a debut; a personal story – ostensibly about the holiday from hell – that manages to riff on mental health, sexual adventure and cultural assumptions. And be funny.

Bob, a Texan transplanted to London for the past eight years – “Because I hate sunshine and love abortion” – is a great storyteller, dropping a detail here, an interesting fact there (asides on weird animal genitalia pepper the show) as she recounts a tale about a Thai holiday that went very wrong.

She sets up the story by telling us that she had been diagnosed as bipolar and among the coping mechanisms she used were walking, therapy and massage. Bob loved Thai massage, she realised, so where better to get one than Thailand, for her very own Eat Pray Love experience?

There she meets an array of characters, from sex workers to a charismatic African chap “selling gold to the Asian market”. As they tell Bob their sob stories, which have striking similarities, the Texan is generous with her time and financial help. We see the catch long before the comic does as Bob is, in this telling, comically blind to the red flags.

But, as she explains, the way her brain works, those red flags could be 10ft tall and she wouldn't see them. And although we see the comic before us in the room – so we know she didn't come to harm – there is real jeopardy in this tale of an innocent abroad; when the comic realised she was in rather deep, it was only with the help of someone else she had befriended there that she was able to dash on to the next flight home.

The couple of songs Bob breaks into don't sit entirely comfortably in the show and at 70 minutes it feels over stretched – but overall this is a lovely, playful shaggy dog story with real heart.

• At Soho Theatre 6-8 March 2025; then touring until 17 April
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