Theatre – Page 61 – ComedyNews.Org :: Comedy News Organization

Emma Sidi: ‘You can only fully write a character if you can love them’

August 6, 2018TheGuardian

The character comic switches roles like a regenerating Time Lord in her new Edinburgh show, Faces of Grace – from a wannable Love Island contestant to a cat-loving loner

It became clear to Emma Sidi this year that her interpretive dance about NHS waiting times would have to go. The 27-year-old comic, who has been seen in W1A and the BBC3 vlogging satire Pls Like, performed the sketch in January as part of a work-in-progress show in a studio space in London; Michael McIntyre was hogging the larger room next door.

Many comedians destined for Edinburgh each August put in a solid 10 or 11 months of workshopping beforehand. Sidi knows the drill, having taken two acclaimed sets to the fringe. Character Breakdown, in 2015, saw her play six different roles, including a feminism professor whose lecture, delivered entirely in Spanish, was prone to stray from the topic. At one point, she relates the tale of being interrupted by Dobby the House Elf during some “solo masturbación.” Sidi’s 2016 show, Telenovela, ended with the audience building giant foil wings for her to fly away.

Paul Mayhew-Archer: ‘I want to show people with Parkinson’s can do comedy

July 20, 2018TheGuardian

The writer of The Vicar of Dibley and Mrs Brown’s Boys discusses the funny side of living with the illness and his new Edinburgh show, Incurable Optimist

“Good news,” the comedy writer Paul Mayhew-Archer likes to say of the moment he learned he had Parkinson’s disease. “The neurologist said I could expect five good years.” There is, of course, some bad news too. “The diagnosis was seven years ago.” “You find it quite difficult to smile, don’t you?” the neurologist said to him at that fateful meeting. “Well, that could be because you just told me I’ve got Parkinson’s,” Mayhew-Archer replied.

It’s tempting to fill this entire article with Mayhew-Archer’s gags about his Parkinson’s. The fact that it takes him so long to fumble for his wallet that he never has to pay for a drink in a pub. Or the irritation that all his limbs get stiffer except for the one he’d occasionally like to get stiff. Immediately after his diagnosis, he decided he could either laugh or cry about Parkinson’s. He chose to laugh, and is now taking the one-man show he’s developed around the disease to the Edinburgh festival.

I have more difficulty getting out of the bath. On the other hand, I quite like being in the bath

End of the Pier review – Les Dennis plays a washed-up standup in Blackpool comedy

July 17, 2018TheGuardian

Park theatre, London
The politics of comedy is examined through the prism of faltering father and son comedians played by Les Dennis and Blake Harrison

‘I realised why I never liked jokes,” says a character in Danny Robins’s new play, channelling comedian-of-the-moment Hannah Gadsby. “It’s because they’re almost always based on a lie.” So should standups make people laugh, or tell their truth? And what if the standup in question – a TV superstar, loved by millions – is a closet bigot? That’s the stuff of End of the Pier, an argument about comedy that flares occasionally into dramatic life.

It begins in the Blackpool home of ex-comic Bobby (rumpled Les Dennis), whose career was destroyed when a Guardian journalist, no less, shopped him for telling racist jokes. Today, he’s visited by his son Michael (The Inbetweeners’ Blake Harrison), a primetime comedy star now fretting over the career-threatening fallout from a stag night gone awry. Enter Michael’s snooty wife Jenna (Tala Gouveia), and the stage is set for schematic debates about class, comedy and PC, and plenty of improbable exposition, as family members spout backstory at one another as if they’ve never met before.

50 shows to see at the Edinburgh fringe 2018

June 29, 2018TheGuardian

Superstar standups, daring dance, Brexit cabaret and a Bon Jovi musical … Dive into our guide to some of the shows at the world’s biggest arts festival

Gilded Balloon

Pieter-Dirk Uys review – South African satirist relives his apartheid clashes

June 5, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
Uys delivers an engaging memoir about his life, from 1940s Cape Town to a regime-mocking drag act

Part memoir, part nostalgia trip for white South Africans, Pieter-Dirk Uys’s new monologue is a world away from the arch satirical turns with which he made his – or rather, his alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout’s – name. There are no frills, just Uys in black, on a stool, narrating his life story from 1940s Cape Town via a London education and back to a career mocking the apartheid regime in theatre and drag. It’s performed in a low-key style, but Uys is a capable raconteur with an eventful story that shines a light on social and political history across two continents.

A long-distance friendship with Sophia Loren provides a rather improbable subplot

Katy Brand: ‘We don’t want to replace men – we just want equal airtime’

May 14, 2018TheGuardian

The actor and comedian explains how her debut play, 3Women, captures the age divide within feminism – and the defiance of the #MeToo era

I recently gave a talk at a girls’ high school. I mention this not only because I am a virtue-signalling monster but also because one of the young women asked something that brought me up short: “How should we react, as young feminists, to older women who don’t seem to support us?”

I sat there and goldfished for a moment, keenly aware that these freshly minted teenage minds sat among their esteemed “older women” teachers. But this is one of the issues I have been grappling with in my debut play, 3Women, which is about three generations of the same family, aged 18, 40, and 65. They come together in an increasingly claustrophobic hotel suite the night before a wedding, ostensibly to enjoy some family bonding time. As more wine is ordered and drunk, the gloves come off, and there are old scores to settle.

Katy Brand: ‘We don’t want to replace men – we just want equal airtime’

May 14, 2018TheGuardian

The actor and comedian explains how her debut play, 3Women, captures the age divide within feminism – and the defiance of the #MeToo era

I recently gave a talk at a girls’ high school. I mention this not only because I am a virtue-signalling monster but also because one of the young women asked something that brought me up short: “How should we react, as young feminists, to older women who don’t seem to support us?”

I sat there and goldfished for a moment, keenly aware that these freshly minted teenage minds sat among their esteemed “older women” teachers. But this is one of the issues I have been grappling with in my debut play, 3Women, which is about three generations of the same family, aged 18, 40, and 65. They come together in an increasingly claustrophobic hotel suite the night before a wedding, ostensibly to enjoy some family bonding time. As more wine is ordered and drunk, the gloves come off, and there are old scores to settle.

Flight of the Conchords review – business time again, with irresistible new songs

March 17, 2018TheGuardian

Milton Keynes theatre
Brett McKenzie and Jemaine Clement return with a magisterial performance

“Some of you are probably thinking, ‘Gosh, they look a lot older,’” says Bret McKenzie, during one of Flight of the Conchords’ deliciously pregnant inter-song pauses. It is a remark met with a wall of knowing laughter: the screens either side of the stage succeed in underlining the star status of the duo, but also in highlighting the flecks of grey peppering their hair. Since they were last in the UK, the New Zealanders may indeed have become “dustier”, they may even have become rustier, but the pair are keen to reassure their Milton Keynes audience that they still know how to rock.

his confidence isn’t misplaced. The Conchords have lost neither their beguiling, monotonous demeanour nor their ability to perform laugh-out-loud, foot-tapping bangers while simultaneously deconstructing them. How easy it would have been to perform nothing but the hits – yet more than half of the 15 songs they play are comparatively new.

Ken Dodd, the man from Mirthy-side: a career in clips and 10 of his best jokes

March 12, 2018TheGuardian

From the Diddymen to dissecting northern humour, the Liverpudlian’s sense of absurdity never deserted him

My agent died at 90. I always think he was 100 and kept 10% for himself.

I do all the exercises every morning in front of the television – up, down, up, down, up, down. Then the other eyelid.

How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows. It’s never been tried.

What a beautiful day for dashing down to Trafalgar Square and chucking a bucket of whitewash over the pigeons and saying ‘There you are, how do you like it?’

I have kleptomania. But when it gets bad, I take something for it.

What a beautiful day for Dame Nellie Melba to drop a choc-ice down her tights and say ‘How’s that for a knickerbocker glory?’

You’ve got to be a comedian to live there. I call it Mirthy-side.

What a lovely day for knocking on a TV policeman’s door and saying: ‘Hello Mrs Savalas. Have you got a licence for your Telly?’

Did any of us, in our wildest dreams, think we’d live long enough to see the end of the DFS sale?

My dad knew I was going to be a comedian. When I was a baby, he said, ‘Is this a joke?’

Ken Dodd discussing northern humour on Late Night Line-Up in 1965 pic.twitter.com/qMYkbjGpbz

Ken Dodd: last of the music-hall maestros

March 12, 2018TheGuardian

The veteran’s linguistic prowess, outlandish appearance and musical smarts could tickle any audience into a state of collective ecstasy

The death of Ken Dodd not only leaves the nation a sadder place, it also feels like the end of an era. Doddy, as everyone in the business called him, was the last link with a music-hall tradition that stretched back through time to include legends such as Max Miller, George Robey and Dan Leno. He adapted his act to the demands of TV and radio, but he was essentially a man of the theatre who could induce in a thousand or more spectators a sense of collective ecstasy.

I claimed, when I interviewed Ken on his 90th birthday, that he and Laurence Olivier were the two performers in my theatre-going experience to be kissed with genius. But of what did that genius consist? For a start, a love of language that enabled him to usher us into a world of grotesque fantasy: a place of hairy Danes with bacon sandwiches strapped to their legs, of satyr-like seniors indulging in snuff orgies, of men with a third eye on the end of their finger. Even childhood was not immune. “I was born one day when me mother was out,” Ken used to quip. “We were so poor the lady next door had me.” That takes us back to Dan Leno who recollected a bizarre infancy in which he varnished the furniture, the cat and the interior of his dad’s boots with strawberry jam.

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