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Sarah Millican: Control Enthusiast review – a non-stop smut fest

January 23, 2018TheGuardian

Marlowe theatre, Canterbury
The comic’s latest show is bursting with gags about bodily functions but reveals precious little about Millican herself

Sarah Millican doesn’t appear much in the tabloid press, she tells us halfway through her touring show, because she’s “a very private person”. That’s not how most people would describe a comic who usually details her toilet habits, bodily functions and sex life in lurid detail. But the remark rings true – because, with each set offering a near-identical cocktail of smut and scuzzy domesticity, it becomes clearer that Millican’s shtick is as much a feat of concealment as intimacy. She’s terrific at what she does, she covers this territory more distinctively than anyone else – but her shows reveal precious little about the 42-year-old woman behind the interminable gags about farts and fannies.

Control Enthusiast is almost uncannily similar to Millican’s previous show, Outsider, which likewise mainlined sex comedy, with occasional detours into pets, fond gags about her feckless husband, and an outspoken feminist bit about body image. But I doubt many will join me in hankering after a new creative direction from Millican, who knows how to give her fans what they want, and does so unstintingly – from the show’s first words (“I’ve just put a clean sanitary towel in”) to its closing set-piece about our host’s bedtime ritual (“I reapply the cream, I wash the finger, I do a fart”).

Jordan Brookes: ‘My dog’s face. It’s so stupid, sad and hilarious’

January 19, 2018TheGuardian

The actor, writer and standup on the things that make him laugh the mostBridget Christie. Her ability to make serious points in fluidly silly ways is so impressive. Continue reading…

Denim: World Tour review – cheeky, transgressive drag act think global

January 15, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
Pop legends in their own minds, this swaggering five-piece retool Whitney and Beyoncé songs into sharp-clawed attacks on Trump and Islam

The conceit of drag girlband Denim’s show World Tour is that they’re performing it on stage at Wembley. Its achievement is to convince you that, were they to do so, they wouldn’t look out of place. They may not be performing to the 12,000 people they envisage in their heads, but they make Soho Theatre sound like that way, with this cheeky, characterful and vocally accomplished hour-long gig.

At the beginning, the five-piece seem too big for Soho’s main house. But then, that’s the joke: their swagger and stadium-pop touches are setting up a punchline to come. And you soon realise that only frontwoman Glamrou La Denim (Amrou Al-Kadhi) is outre in the conventional drag manner, and even her camp theatrics come with political edge. Her opening gag, singing the words “Alan Ayckbourn” in the style of a muezzin, are a mere palate cleanser for the solo routine mid-show, a sharp-clawed attack on Islam’s attitude to queer identity. It’s striking how transgressive this feels, as Glamrou retools Whitney Houston’s So Emotional into an Allah-baiting cri de coeur.

‘Nothing was off-limits’: Mark Thomas on his West Bank comedy club

January 12, 2018TheGuardian

When the activist-standup put on a comedy show in a refugee camp in Jenin, the jokes he heard were angry, funny – and radical

The first time I went to Jenin was when we did the Walking the Wall project – to hike the length of Israel’s wall in the West Bank. When we started, I was hugely worried about it all – we didn’t know whether we could do it, we didn’t know what the experience would be. We walked each day with translators and a lot of them didn’t understand what we were trying to do, which was partly our fault for not explaining it properly, but also because rambling isn’t a big pastime in the West Bank.

The only person who seemed to understand it was Juliano Mer-Khamis, the director of the Jenin Freedom theatre. I had gone there on the urging of a friend, and because I was intrigued by the idea of this theatre in a refugee camp. When we arrived and told Juliano what we were doing and why – how we were trying to talk to as many people on our journey as possible – he said: “Oh fuck, we were going to do that.” We got on like a house on fire and I loved what they were doing. Juliano was charismatic and would talk about human rights being at the centre of the work. And true to his word, the first production they put on was Animal Farm, as an obvious critique of the Palestinian National Authority.

We put on our show in the middle of the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike – people questioned whether we should do it

Different Party review – artful take on the absurdity of office life

January 11, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The drudgery of bureaucracy is sent up with great expressivity, loose-limbed flair and a heightened sense of the ridiculous

Absurdist takes on the office environment are as old as the office itself. From Herman Melville’s Bartleby via David Brent to the award-winning theatre show Paperweight, there’s a noble tradition of artists sending up the ritualistic drudgery of – well, almost everyone else’s working life. Now, New Zealand physical comics Trygve Wakenshaw and Barnie Duncan bring us their contribution to the genre, an hour of slapstick bureaucracy that has little new to say about office life, but says it with great expressivity and a heightened sense of the ridiculous.

Presented as part of the London international mime festival, it begins as it means to go on, with Wakenshaw (gangly, too big for his suit) and Duncan (stubby, too little for his) making as if their briefcases are frisky dogs. It’s artfully done and – like the later routines in which the cases float, or refuse to move – it might have been performed at any time since the salad days of music hall. Fuelling the old-school vibe, Wakenshaw and Duncan’s office is curiously retro: at Ruck’s Leather Interiors, orders are taken by phone, paper billows out of filing cabinets and there are no computers in sight.

Robert Newman: Total Eclipse of Descartes review – philosophical funnies

January 10, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
An infinite number of monkeys, Pavlov’s dogs and Cartesian thought are gleefully debunked in a jaunty and refreshingly intelligent show

At the start of his comedy career, Robert Newman was famous – with partner David Baddiel – for a sketch called History Today in which they played fogeyish academics dissing each other’s mums. Twenty-five years later, it’s history every day for a comedian – a little less famous now – whose successive shows delve deeper into the past to fathom the dodgy politics of the present. His new set, Total Eclipse of Descartes, like its two predecessors, takes aim at what Newman sees as a rationalist fallacy – in this case, the body/brain duality as proposed by the titular 17th-century philosopher. On Descartes’ flawed logic, he blames the centuries of human exceptionalism that followed and much of the “macho sadistic melodrama” that passes for science today.

Newman’s gone on a twisty journey over the past two decades, first fleeing from success, then edging back to it through his novels, activism and wilfully uncommercial boffin-standup with a ukulele garnish. Having pioneered stadium comedy with Baddiel, Newman is now as likely to be found on an arena stage as … well, as Michael McIntyre is to deconstruct Cartesian thought. And yet he’s still got comedy chops. The new show isn’t just an intellectually restless tour of the sterility of three centuries of philosophy, it’s got jokes, too, some of them as childishly silly as History Today.

Sophie Willan: who are you calling a northern working-class comic?

January 9, 2018TheGuardian

Her childhood in care, her mother’s heroin addiction, her days as a sex worker … Bolton comedian Sophie Willan is turning the details of her life into dazzling standup

It’s great to have Sophie Willan’s working-class voice in the comedy industry. That’s not (just) me talking, that’s how “loads of people” have greeted the Lancastrian since her standup debut in 2016. “Some people are quite up for being pigeonholed like that,” says Willan. “But I think nuance is important.”

What do onlookers mean when they peg Willan as “northern” and “working-class”? How accurately can those labels describe any of us? Those are the questions posed by her second show, Branded, which tours next month. With it, Willan enacts phase two of her manifesto, as she calls it, to bring authentic working-class voices into the mainstream – while questioning why those voices are momentarily hip again.

Working class may be ‘cool’ now, but ‘they want your identity and your story, but not the personality that goes with it’

Omid Djalili – cheesy gags and silly dancing from a lovable schmuck

January 9, 2018TheGuardian

Leicester Square theatre, London
The convivial comic serves up a hotchpotch of creaking jokes, funny accents and satire – but not all his fans can stomach it

‘I’ve been heckled, I’ve been physically attacked,” says Omid Djalili from the stage, “but I’ve never before been overcome by fumes.” Tonight, he is, after his most vocal fan in the second row vomits 20 minutes before the end of his set. Everyone within a five-metre radius scatters; the drunken offender staggers to the exit; Djalili temporises, uncertain whether the gig can continue.

It can, albeit through a pukey miasma: Djalili delivers his closing routines from behind a mask improvised from his T-shirt. It’s not the finale anyone would fantasise for the first night of their London run – nearly two years after the Anglo-Iranian comic started touring Schmuck for a Night. But nor is it a disaster for Djalili, whose entertaining but unexceptional show has been given an unearned slice of “you had to be there”.

Angus Gordon and Aaron Chen review – kings of cringe fascinate and frustrate

January 8, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The award-winning Aussie duo flout standup’s conventions to mine laughs from misery and nihilism. It’s certainly bold – but can you get too much of a bad thing?

The list of best newcomer winners at the Melbourne comedy festival doesn’t exactly heave with famous names – not to people in the northern hemisphere, at least. But there are a few, including Flight of the Conchords and Daily Show correspondent Ronnie Chieng. Will the names Angus Gordon and Aaron Chen one day trip as easily from the tongue? On the basis of this double-billed UK debut, you’d probably hedge your bets. Yet you can see what swayed the judges: Gordon and Chen are distinctive personalities, with ambitious new angles on the art of standup.

But they’re also both, to some degree, anti-comics: performers who scorn the conventions of standup and prompt the kind of nervous laugh generated by material more painful or inept than outright funny. Anti-comedy has a distinguished lineage, from Andy Kaufman via Gregg Turkington’s dyspeptic alter ego Neil Hamburger to the monotonous Brit Edward Aczel. That’s the ballpark we’re in this evening: discomfort in place of mirth. As Gordon says at the top of his set (looping in Chen’s sidekick Jon Lo): “We’re just three variations on Australian awkwardness.” Which, after an hour and 40 minutes, doesn’t seem like much variation at all.

Ahir Shah: ‘The funniest number? £350m, in a gallows humour sort of way’

January 5, 2018TheGuardian

The 2017 Edinburgh comedy award nominee on the things that make him laugh the most

Doug Stanhope, Emo Philips, Reginald D Hunter and Adam Hess are the only comedians who have made me laugh so much I couldn’t breathe. I don’t know if this is a compliment.

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