Soho Theatre
Veronica Lee
Jen Brister loves her five-year-old twin boys, she is at pains to tell us, even when they have a major meltdown and, like Little Lord Fauntleroys, refuse to eat broken biscuits. Stories like these are sprinkled throughout her new show, Under Privilege, in which she describes trying to instil proper values in children who, she hopes, will probably never know any life struggles, and the broader issue of what privilege is.There’s a lot of domestic detail in the show, and Brister is disarmingly honest about the irritations of parenting – although, she says drily, she dodged a bullet by not being Read more ...
Veronica Lee
No more glitzy and glam musical shows for Jayde Adams, the comic tells us at the top of the hour. Now, after a few years in the business, she wants to be taken seriously (or seriously enough to host Crazy Delicious on Channel 4), so the sequinned Spandex has gone into storage – “no more camel toes” – and she's popped on jeans and a black turtleneck. In The Ballad of Kylie Jenner's Old Face she has something serious to say, and people will listen because of that black jumper, as previously modelled by Angelina Jolie. It screams earnestness. Actually, Adams does have something serious to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Matt Forde sets out his stall in Brexit: Pursued by a Bear from the first line: “We meet in diabolical circumstances.” These aren't good times, he says, with two major leaders in the Western world whose relationship with the truth is merely that of passing acquaintance. Add in the UK's continuing divisions over Brexit, and diabolical seems apt.We know where Forde is coming from. He's a proud Remainer and Blairite, a former adviser to the Labour Party and a vehement critic of Jeremy Corbyn – who gets it in the neck just as much as Boris Johnson does. Forde sees little difference between Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Musical comedy siblings Nicola and Rosie Dempsey (Flo and Joan were their grandmother and great-aunt's names) get along very well – even being mistaken for lovers by one Paris hotel who gave them a double bed – and certainly their chat between songs, where they politely interrupt each other and finish each other's sentences, is testimony to that. So the inspiration for their new show, Before the Screaming Starts – in which they consider the possibility that their professional partnership might end in personal bitterness – was, they say, the now infamous Bros documentary After the Screaming Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ivo Graham's latest show The Game of Life follows on from his previous hour, in which he talked about passing a milestone in life and the prospect of starting a family. Now he is a dad, and uses domestic detail as the starting point for some fine observational comedy about fatherhood, class and politics.There are teasing glimpses into his background. Graham comes from a “family of squares with me the occasional rhombus” and while he may describe himself as weak and pathetic in one routine, his comedy gets meatier with each show. He is usually the fall-guy, as when he recounts the toe- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lou Sanders has named her latest show (which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe) Say Hello to Your New Step-Mummy. But, as she tells us in her opening comments, she's not a mother or stepmother, and hasn't yet met a father she likes, but “by the end of the year, God willing…”Much of the show is taken up with Sanders describing the whys and wherefores of her 12th-month “man ban” – something suggested by her healer Jill in the Pyrenees, who does her healing via Skype, and told her she needs to “reset her patterns”.This state of affairs was in some part prompted by trolling that Sanders received Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel is a very fine comic, and over the past few years has become an acclaimed author of children's books. So I'm genuinely sad to say that his debut play at Soho Theatre really isn't very good. God's Dice does have its moments, for sure, and some laughs, but at two hours, 15 minutes it's massively overlong and over blown.Baddiel has set himself a big task by tackling a big issue – the interface of science and religion. Alan Davies plays Henry, a quantum physicist teaching at a provincial university, whose certainty about the world is shaken when Edie (Leila Mimmack), a young Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Shuck 'n' Jive is an hour-long two-hander about writing a play about being black in a white industry. The industry? Theatre. Performance. The stage.Simone (played by Olivia Onyehara), an opera singer, is from Lincolnshire. Cassi (played by Tanisha Spring), an actress, is from south London (so south, in fact, it's the part of Croydon where you can see countryside). But hold on. Is the play really about what it says it is? On the one hand, yes: the anecdotes come thick and fast. Meta-pastiche minstrel shows take over the auditions which Cassi and Simone attend. Hamilton and Porgy and Bess are 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 ...
Matt Wolf
If good intentions were all, The View UpStairs would be Gypsy. As it is, the European premiere of this 2017 Off Broadway musical set in a New Orleans gay bar firebombed by arson in 1973 serves both as an important reminder of a grievous event in LGBTQ history and as an object lesson in the difficulty of writing a persuasive show. At two interval-less hours, the musical at the Soho Theatre takes a long time to get to its inevitably calamitous ending and depends no end on possibly the most name-heavy ensemble (especially for musicals buffs) ever gathered at this address: the cast's commitment Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This witty street-smart play about a white-skinned boy born to a mixed-race mother deploys its narrative with the dexterity of a dance. Two performers move backwards and forwards across the stage, switching through different characters, skin colours, genders and generations, as they tell a story of pride, poverty, passion and prejudice.We’re in Camden as the play starts, where it’s, “Really fucking hot. That inside-an-oven hot you only get in a big concrete city.” Playwright and performer Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s vivid humorous language ambushes you from the outset. A police officer from the Read more ...