Comedy
Veronica Lee
Sam Simmons' new show – for which he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award last month and the Barry award at Melbourne earlier this year – is titled Spaghetti for Breakfast, but could easily be called “Things That Shit Me”; the phrase pops up repeatedly on a recorded loop, as the Australian comic runs through the large number of things that annoy him.The hour-long show is the surrealist comedian's most personal yet; among the wonderfully silly clowning, the comic delivers painfully honest anecdotes about his childhood, which help explain “why I turned out this weird”.Apparently throwaway Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kevin Bridges, although only 28, has been performing comedy for 10 years. Strange to relate then, that he still gets rattled by hecklers (even friendly ones telling him he's awesome – “Relax, it's not a One Direction concert”) and that this otherwise excellent gig descended into acrimony with Bridges leaving the stage at the end clearly irritated.It really wasn't that bad – and Bridges' annoyance was far greater than that of the audience, so let's begin with the many positives. In A Whole Different Story the Glaswegian relates what a year it has been – for him personally and in the broader Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kieran Hodgson, Voodoo Rooms ★★★★When Kieran Hodgson was growing up in West Yorkshire in the early years of the century, he was obsessed with two things – cycling and Lance Armstrong, then the greatest cyclist the world had ever seen.In 2003, where the engaging and very funny Lance begins, 15-year-old Kieran is preparing for a cycling challenge organised by the scout troop he and his best mates Simon and Matthew belong to, run by Rob.As he tells the tale, Hodgson, wearing a yellow cycling jersey, hops on and off a static bike, and moves seamlessly among a large cast of vividly realised Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Joseph Morpurgo, Pleasance Courtyard ***** In Soothing Sounds For Baby, Joseph Morpurgo uses found objects - vinyl LPs with content so esoteric you would swear he had invented them - and the framework of Radio 4's Desert Island Discs to fashion an ingenious and wonderful show. Morpurgo is supposedly Kirsty Young's guest on the radio show - although in his painstaking cut and paste clips of the programme, Young's questioning becomes increasingly fractious so we know something is up. Each of his song choices leads into a tableau using a soundscape, visual gags, music, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nish Kumar, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★There's been so little out-and-out political comedy at this year's Fringe that it's a real joy to find a stand-up so engaged with politics as Nish Kumar.Kumar lays out his stall early on. The issue of diversity in the arts is, he says, "a subject very close to my face". He goes on to discuss why men still dominate everything, and the reasons why Jeremy Corbyn is popular. Full marks for being bang up to date.Although he also talks engagingly about seemingly trite subjects including the board game Monopoly and the American Pie and James Bond franchises, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Diane Chorley, Underbelly Potterrow ★★★Diane Chorley is the former owner of The Flick nightclub in Canvey Island, Essex. Back in the 1980s it was the place to go, and celebrities – from Michael Barrymore to George Michael and Mick Jagger – used to pass through its doors. In fact, it was David Bowie who gave her the title "Duchess of Canvey".But it all went wrong when she got into some bother, first with rival club Safari Beige, and then when the police realised why the club was so popular; the Duchess, you see, was providing the happy pills and potions for her customers. Now she is out of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Kinsey Sicks, Gilded Balloon **** The Kinsey Sicks, a four-piece drag a cappella act, were formed in 1993 and have played off-Broadway and Las Vegas; this is their UK debut. Their name is a play on Kinsey 6, the point in the scale of sexual attraction as exclusively homosexual, and they bill themselves as “Barbarella meets beautyshop”, or “chicks with shticks”.The set-up for the story is that they are taking part in a television reality show - America's Next Top Bachelor Housewife Celebrity Hoarder Makeover Star Gone Wild!, as the show title has it - where they are all girly smiles, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Aisling Bea, Gilded Balloon ★★★★Aisling Bea received an Edinburgh Comedy Awards best newcomer nomination for her excellent show in 2013, and she returns with another high-energy hour of clowning about and rapid-fire delivery mixed with some astute political observation. Entitled Plan Bea, it's ostensibly about confidence and shame, although a clear theme never quite emerges.She mentions with some pride Ireland's recent vote for equal marriage, contrasting the country of her childhood when her single mother would have been better thought of had her husband died rather than left, and who used Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tom Allen, The Stand ★★★★Tom Allen tells us Both Worlds is about being gay, watching daytime TV, doing the gardening and his "crushing sense of wasting his life". But this is no misery comedy, far from it, as Allen gives us an hour of sparkling wit, much of it aimed at himself, while slinging a few piercing arrows at deserving targets.He addresses his neuroses, recounting the time as a child he stood on the edge of the swimming pool but didn't dare dive in – a good metaphor for a life lived as an observer rather than participant. He didn't fit in at his south London school, he Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Katherine Ryan, The Stand ★★★★ "TV's Katherine Ryan," she introduces herself with heavy irony; the Canadian has gone from Fringe performer to never off the telly in just a few years and knows that the sobriquet can be both a compliment and a drawback. Yet when her waspish humour is such good value it's easy to see why producers love her.But she's even better live, and in Kathbum (her mother's childhood nickname for her), Ryan describes how she is soon to make a speech at her sister's wedding, the starting point of some very good comedy about her childhood. She was always an outsider in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie, The Stand ★★★★Bridget Christie, the comic credited with bringing feminism to the fore with her 2013 Edinburgh Comedy Awards-winning show, broadens her target for withering political analysis and to great effect.In A Book For Her (also the title of her recently published book) Christie guys herself in her opening line, telling us that 11am is the perfect time for comedy about gender-based violence - "or at misogynists' funerals, widows love it" - and that she's not really a feminist, as that was done for marketing purposes to sell the book.There's a masterful take-down of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people in the UK will know US comic Rob Delaney from his wonderfully sardonic Twitter feed (1.17 million followers) or his autobiography Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage - a painfully honest (and often snortingly funny) account of his alcoholism as a younger man. More recently they may know him as the co-star (with Sharon Horgan) of Channel 4's Catastrophe, the hilarious and sexually honest sitcom they created about a couple of strangers whose casual affair leads to them becoming parents together.Any of those should have prepared the QEH audience Read more ...