Tag: Culture

Soho theatre, London
As well as diagnosing the entertaining eccentricities of patients, musical comic Kay issues an electrifying clarion call on behalf of NHS staff

Musical comic Adam Kay is a former doctor, of obstetrics and gynaecology – or “brats and twats” as he demurely puts it. His new show (from which a book has been commissioned) now addresses that career, partly for political reasons, as his blistering denouement makes clear. Those closing 10 minutes are tonally a thing apart from what precedes them: an emotionally naked disclosure of a career-ending incident, turned politically blunt clarion call for the staff of our beleaguered NHS. It doesn’t even pretend to be comedy, and makes a mockery of aesthetic judgment.

It’s stirring stuff; Jeremy Hunt should be fed this show on a drip. Even its main section – blackly comic extracts from Kay’s hospital diary, intercut with punning songs – counters the Tory claim that striking junior doctors are in it for the money. Here, we find our diarist missing Christmases, cancelling longed-for holidays and sacrificing relationships at the altar of medicine. He meets the eccentricities and idiocies of the British public with infinite patience and an infinitesimally raised eyebrow, and daily endures sights – geysers of patients’ blood; “the worst penis I had ever seen” – that would make lesser mortals (critics, say) quail.

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The standup and Friday Night Dinner star on the things that make him laugh the mostDave Chappelle on Sesame Street. Continue reading…

Soho theatre, London
Light-hearted but trenchant, Ilyas’s show Made in Britain keeps the audience on their toes as he focuses on what unites, rather than divides us

After the EU referendum result, says Tez Ilyas, conversations about race and identity need to take place. Hence his current show, Made in Britain, which stakes a light-hearted but trenchant claim for the Britishness of his “BNP” – British National Pakistani – life so far. Ilyas is a cheeky chappie from Blackburn, more Opportunity Knocks than op-ed, and his show can easily be enjoyed as perky comedy. But he doesn’t soft-soap his indignation that some would consider him, and people like him, insufficiently British – and his show makes a persuasive counter-argument, thanks in part to its peaceable good humour in the face of such provocation.

A balance is adroitly struck from the off between ingratiating himself, and playing up his supposed difference. The opening routine, about the N-word, defuses tension by asserting his own, very British angst about political correctness, then follows up with some larky dancing to south Asian music. A later neat joke finds him struggling to remember the approved current terminology for white people; another – finding common cause with his likely audience, then instantly “othering” himself – tells us that: “Personally, I voted to remain in the European caliphate.”

Related: Class of 2015: who are the Edinburgh fringe’s funniest newcomers?

An audience volunteer tells our British-Pakistani host that in the US​​ he’d likely get described as Indian

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