Soho Theatre
Veronica Lee
You have to admire the ambition of a show called Every Single Thing in My Whole Entire Life, the latest from Zoë Coombs Marr, which she performed at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and is now in its Soho Theatre residency. It’s an hour that takes on some big themes – sexuality, mental health, the state of comedy – while digging down into her life as she reaches 40, and has done something of a stock check.For the most part it works as Coombs Marr talks us through not what we may consider to be the big life events of weddings and funerals, but those brief moments we experience that stick in our Read more ...
Pandemonium, Soho Theatre review - satire needs a shot of Pfizer's finest to revive tired storylines
Gary Naylor
In 2020, throughout the country, many people’s lives were affected adversely by an ever-present threat to our already fragile society. Though most got over it, many people still bear the cost every day, sapping them of energy, making them cough and splutter frequently, instilling a longing that it would just go away and stay away. Like many, I have been suffering from “Long Boris”, the affliction reactivated last week with his appearance as the Covid Inquiry Variant spread far and wide. And such topicality ought to work in favour of Armando Iannucci’s first venture on to the stage, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The show begins before the audience troops into the theatre; the walls of the staircase leading to it are plastered with images of Kate Berlant, its writer and performer; we file past her (sitting by the doorway with a sign saying “Ignore me”) and a long word-salad statement by her; and then, before she appears, we watch a film on the onstage screen in which – in arty black-and-white, quoting Stanislavsky and Oscar Wilde – Berlant preens and pouts and Looks Very Serious.It nicely sets up Kate Berlant Is KATE, her one-woman show (already a hit off-Broadway), in which the American stand-up and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in New York City, in an upscale loft apartment, with that absence of stuff that speaks of a power to acquire anything. There are paintings on the walls, but we see only their descriptions: we learn that the owner (curator, in his word) really only sees the descriptions, too, and that the aesthetic and artistic elements barely register. The maid has been given the evening off – it’s soon obvious why – and an art dealer flits about nervously waiting for his client to arrive with a view toward arranging a significant purchase. The artist is Black; everyone else, indeed, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s now Edinburgh Fringe transfer season in London, but here’s one they made earlier: Cora Bissett’s Fringe First-winning autobiographical play from the 2018 Festival about her time in 1990s indie band Darlingheart. Though the broad shape of this tale is familiar, Bissett’s gig-theatre approach lends it a raw authenticity and engaging confessional quality.Bissett (pictured below) was still at school when she replied to an advert in the local Fife paper and became the lead singer of Darlingheart. She was driven less by musical ambition – though Patti Smith was already a favourite – more Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Memory is a funny thing: it can get you through exams; it can comfort you or distress you; it can last a lifetime or go in an instant. In Sofie Hagen's case, her idiosyncratic one has provided material for her new show Bumswing, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe and is now at Soho Theatre.Bumswing, she tells us at the top of the hour with a deceptively sweet smile, is a departure from her previous few shows, which were about anxiety, abuse and self-harm (one of which, Bubblewrap, won her the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer in 2015). Her therapist told her to perhaps cut back Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Edinburgh Fringe does throw up some oddities – in comedy shows, of course, but also in its dishing out of awards. And so it was that Ciarán Dowd's marvellous Don Rodolfo deservedly gained the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer, even though he's an old Fringe hand. But as his previous work was as part of the sketch troupe BEASTS he was eligible for this, his debut solo show.Don Rodolfo is a famed swordsman, in both senses of the word, swashing his buckle throughout the land in 17th-century Spain, and Dowd presents a wonderfully daft, energetic hour of storytelling as Rodolfo hunts Read more ...
Veronica Lee
With Love from St Tropez was inspired by Shazia Mirza's visit to a beach in the south of France that had a nudist beach nearby – and it was just before the French government's ban on burkinis. It's a great starting point for Mirza's stock in trade – speaking truths as a woman of Pakistani parentage that sit uncomfortably with the white British society she was born into – and, as someone with a public profile, caught in the uncomfortable (but comedically fertile) territory of being expected to speak for all Muslims, while the Muslim community just wishes she would shut up.Mirza, never a comic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kerry Godliman is such an affable and down-to-earth onstage presence that when she talks about whether she should move now that her area has upped and come – you can tell by the local baker making sourdough loaves – you think how much her neighbours would miss her.Moving – whether geographically or along the social scale – is the central theme of Stick or Twist (which I saw at Soho Theatre), but Godliman neatly swerves into lots of other territory including bad parenting, female friendship and the invasion of hipsters in her previously gritty London abode. If she and her husband sold up, she Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a day to open your political stand-up show, entitled State of the Nation, a few hours after Theresa May had announced a snap election. If Ayesha Hazarika needed any extra material, yesterday morning's events would certainly have supplied it. And sure enough, she gamely starts the show by saying drily, “You can only imagine how much fun I've had today,” before ripping up the show's script.She does some strong topical material at the top of the hour before she settles into the show proper, when she neatly puts the election into context for Labour voters. Jeremy Corbyn will not be amused at Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nick Mohammed doesn't do things by halves as his chatty airhead alter ego Mr Swallow. Forget the scholarly approach of finely researched biographies of Harry Houdini (“boring!”); his “first-ever entirely true auto-biopic” of the magician and escapologist comes complete with conjuring tricks, song-and-dance numbers and a whole lot of laughs.Ably assisted by David Elms as Mr Goldsworth and Kieran Hodgson as Jonathan (in oriental tunics for no discernible reason), plus an onstage pianist, Mr Swallow chatters on, while Mr Goldsworth, the producer of this show within a show, has a devil of a job Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“It's a really bad word,” Jena Friedman says as she opens her show, American C*nt. “...American.” And so begins an evening of ultra-dry, drawled-out and darkly feminist wit that encompasses everything from recent atrocities in Belgium and Donald Trump to abortion and Hamas.Friedman, as befits someone who has written for, among others, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and David Letterman, can write a sparkling line, and is not short of opinions or the self-possession to deliver them unapologetically. The show's segment on abortion – “the abortion portion” – takes no prisoners. She suggests Read more ...