New Zealand comic Rose Matafeo is a fan of romcoms and has decided she is destined to appear in one at some point in her career. As she explains, it's not possible – as a mixed-race woman – to play the film's heroine, but she is surely a shoo-in for the role described in show's title, Sassy Best Friend; after all, she has the wild hair, the specs and the perky personality that such a character demands.This is a breezy but wry set-up for an hour of comedy that subtly examines race, feminism and mental health as Matafeo explores her teenage anxieties and how she has (mostly) overcome them as an Read more ...

Hannah Gadsby was awarded best show (jointly with John Robins) at the 2017 Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Nanette, which had already been given the equally prestigious Barry award at last year's Melbourne Comedy Festival. Gadsby draws us in gently, telling us that Nanette was so titled before she really knew what the show was going to be about, and she named it after meeting an unfriendly and unhelpful barista in smalltown Australia, in one of those places that she – a lesbian who is sometimes taken for a man – feels really unwelcome in.That's probably the lightest moment in Nanette's 80 minutes Read more ...

“I don't want to talk about Donald Trump,” Andrew Maxwell tells us as he comes on stage at the beginning of Showtime, because no matter what comics make up about the US President, he then goes and does something more weirdly comic, more comically weird, than they could ever invent.Instead the Irish standup, who has lived in the UK for the greater half of his life, muses on Brexit and beyond, seeing the world through a resident's eyes – but with the sharp observation of someone who will always remain an outsider.Daftness always quickly follows the seriousTalking of which, this keen European Read more ...

The Edinburgh Fringe is usually the high point of the year for comedy, but in truth it wasn't a solid five-star year – although there were some stand-out performers. And if the test of good comedy is the shows that stay with you, and which you want to see again, then a few are definitely up there.Chief among that group was Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, an astonishing piece of work that she says is her valedictory show. That's because making comedy for other people from her life and experiences as a gay woman growing up in a deeply conservative and homophobic Tasmania – many of them painful or Read more ...

A fair few Edinburgh Fringe shows are just that – things that work perfectly in the “let's do the show right here” spirit that permeates the festival, in a tiny (and often grotty) venue that adds hugely to the vibe. That's all well and good during August, of course, but come later in the year when a show moves beyond the festival confines it can lose much of its spark.So it's a delight that Rob Kemp's The Elvis Dead, which was a word-of-mouth hit before it deservedly gained a best newcomer nomination in the lastminute.com Edinburgh Comedy Awards, has made the journey south for a late-night Read more ...

It's not often the publicity material for a comedy show has a health advisory attached. If you are allergic to eggs you may have to give Natalie Palamides' show Laid – which won best newcomer at the lastminute.com Edinburgh Comedy Awards at the Fringe in August – a miss, and that would be a shame.It is by turns delightful and disturbing, as Palamides – a Los Angeles-based actress and writer from Pittsburgh who appears as Buttercup in The Powerpuff Girls – explores motherhood, fertility and many things beyond as she brings her playful but knowing character to life. Literally, as at the start Read more ...

In David Ireland's new hour-long two-hander – a co-production between Soho Theatre and west London's Orange Tree – two strangers, Janet and Dermot, meet for a casual hook-up arranged over the internet. The glitch, or at least surprise: she appears dressed as a mouse. That opening gambit won't surprise those who saw Ireland's earlier Royal Court entry Cyprus Avenue, in which protagonist Eric is so convinced his granddaughter is Gerry Adams that he scrawls a beard on her face to prove himself right. And in this considerably more modest entry, Ireland's penchant for Read more ...

Mat Ewins comes on stage with a bullet belt slung across his chest. Indiana Jones he ain't, but what follows is a spoof on that film genre, a convoluted narrative that makes little sense but has a large degree of bombast as the show's title, Mat Ewins: Presents Adventureman 7 – the Return of Adventureman, suggests.It's an hour of multimedia storytelling, visual jokes and a lot of audience engagement (plus a brilliant long-form gag), in which Ewins trots out a daft tale involving a cursed amulet from Tutankhamen’s tomb that has gone missing from the British History Museum where he works, and Read more ...

There were a lot of shocked and disappointed people after the EU referendum last year and several comics have used the result to fashion some good comedy, delivering state-of-the-nation material in their shows. For Ahir Shah, though, the more he thought about the result, the more he took it personally.He starts Control at Soho Theatre by giving us a mnemonic for his first name – Alpha, Hero, Indian, Romeo. It's a deft way into revealing his comic self – bombastic, teasing, self-deprecating, playful – and it's a persona he falls back into several times in the show (which I saw at the Edinburgh Read more ...

It’s hot. Real hot. And you’re dancing, just lost in music. You’re at the legendary Shrine nightclub in Lagos, where Afrobeat star Fela Kuti is king. It’s 1994. And it’s hot. Sweat is just pouring off you, no longer in little trickles but soaking through your clothes. And still you dance. As the beat pounds along, you can hear Fela intone: “Men are born; kings are made”, then something about “one nation, indivisible”, before he says, “War has never been the answer — long live Nigeria! Viva Africa!” It sounds like glory. Surely this is heaven on earth.The next day, in Adura Onashile’s 65- Read more ...

Suzi Ruffell tells it straight: she's working-class and proud, but some people might think she's "common", which is the show's title. She has devised a quick quiz for us to check if we're working-class ourselves, and among the amusing tell-tale signs is: did your mum use to freeze milk? A new one on me, but the show is off to a good start.Ruffell comes from a large family in Portsmouth and, for some reason the comic can't fathom, they ignored birthdays and made little of Christmas, but made a big deal of Bonfire Night – and when talking about her relatives she paints a vivid picture of Read more ...

It’s television, not theatre, that has real power. Real cultural force. Cultural muscle. Take the case of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show, Fleabag. First staged in 2013 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it has appeared twice at the Soho since then, garnering a shelf-load of theatre nominations and awards along the way.That’s great, but nobody outside the narrow world of the London theatre scene knew much about it. Then, earlier this year, this hour-long monologue was shown on BBC Three as a six-part series – and bang! Suddenly everyone was talking about it. What had started as a piece Read more ...