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The 10 best things to do this week: Machynlleth festival, Arca and Mindhorn

April 21, 2017TheGuardian

Britain’s best standups hit the Welsh town, the Venezuelan producer plays London and Julian Barratt stars as a washed-up former TV cop

From Cradle to Stage
Mum’s the word! Literally, actually, as Foo Fighter Dave Grohl’s mother, Virginia, has gone around the world to interview mothers about their famous offspring, from Pharrell Williams’s ma Carolyn to Amy Winehouse’s mummy Janis for a new book. It’s out on 25 April.
From Cradle to Stage by Virginia Hanlon Grohl is published by Coronet, £20

TJ & Dave review – wizards of improv conjure a comedy gem

April 12, 2017TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The Chicago pair show they are masters of their art with an off-the-cuff performance that is as poignant and sharply observed as any scripted show

Most writers and comics spend months – even years – honing scripts and refining gags. Chicago improvisers TJ Jagodowski and David Pasquesi make mincemeat of all that, plucking from thin air a one-act, multi-character play that is as funny, shrewdly observed and emotionally complex as many a slaved-over work. Right up there with the best of the Pajama Men and Improbable Theatre, they really are Zen masters of their art. I found their unshowy and beadily intelligent improv blissful to watch.

There are no frills, gimmicks or audience participation, just two middle-aged men building a story detail by extemporised detail. It begins with two office workers wondering at the late arrival of a third. One of them wears a new watch, bequeathed by his dead dad; the other, touched, spontaneously phones his own father. On these bare bones, fragments of a tale are fleshed out, in which an elderly couple fret about macaroni etiquette, a 7-Eleven attendant kvetches about his uncle Marcel, and a driver with blood spattered across the grill of his car “has no idea if it was a kid or a raccoon”.

Whoopi Goldberg to Secret Cinema: top things to do in the UK this week

February 10, 2017TheGuardian

From the actor’s rarely seen character comedy to an immersive version of Moulin Rouge: your at-a-glance guide to the best in culture

Whoopi Goldberg
A brilliant one-off: the award-winning actor brings two performances of her character comedy to the London Palladium for the first time on Saturday 11 February. Her standup deals in alter-egos, so expect to meet Fontaine the career dope-smoker or Lurleen the southern matriarch.
At London Palladium, W1

Silver Lining review – witty lines can’t save Sandi Toksvig’s care-home comedy

February 9, 2017TheGuardian

Rose theatre, Kingston
Toksvig’s play has plenty of good gags but there’s far too little characterisation, leaving an experienced ensemble treading water

Sandi Toksvig’s new comedy, set in a retirement home during a flood, puts five older women firmly centre stage. That should be something to cheer about: but in order to win itself a feelgood ending, Silver Lining plays to the stereotype that these women are useless old biddies whose stunted lives are far behind them, and who now exist in the stultifying limbo of the care home, protected from a terrifying outside world of technological, social and cultural change.

Silver Lining review – witty lines can’t save Sandi Toksvig’s care-home comedy

February 9, 2017TheGuardian

Rose theatre, Kingston
Toksvig’s play has plenty of good gags but there’s far too little characterisation, leaving an experienced ensemble treading water

Sandi Toksvig’s new comedy, set in a retirement home during a flood, puts five older women firmly centre stage. That should be something to cheer about: but in order to win itself a feelgood ending, Silver Lining plays to the stereotype that these women are useless old biddies whose stunted lives are far behind them, and who now exist in the stultifying limbo of the care home, protected from a terrifying outside world of technological, social and cultural change.

Still Game: Live 2 review – hilarity ahoy as the TV sitcom takes a sea cruise

February 5, 2017TheGuardian

SSE Hydro, Glasgow
Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill return to the stage with an even more ambitious live show – and just as many laughs

When does a sitcom get too big for its boots? It’s a worry that must have crossed the minds of Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill on returning to the hangar-like Hydro where, in 2014, Still Game played to 210,000 people in 21 nights.

There’s something surreal about seeing the TV escapades of Jack and Victor in a venue where bouncers guard the stage and the audience needs two giant screens just to see what’s happening. Undaunted, they’ve come back with a show of even greater ambition – and just as many laughs.

Get ready, here I come: 20 talents set to take 2017 by storm

January 7, 2017TheGuardian

The singer who stunned Pharrell, the writer to rival Pynchon, the son of a stone carver making art out of his body … we choose 20 names to watch in stage, film, books, art, design, music and TV

More on the unmissable culture of 2017

Manwatching: a secret female playwright’s liberating look at sex

January 6, 2017TheGuardian

The author of a hit show about desire explains why she’s staying anonymous – and why her play is only performed by male comedians

You’ve written a hit play, it’s been programmed for a run at the Royal Court – and you can’t take a shred of credit for it? You’d forgive the anonymous writer of Manwatching for feeling some frustration – but there’s little in evidence. “I keep telling the friends who know it’s me [and who are sworn to secrecy] that everyone should do a piece anonymously once in their lives. It’s tremendously liberating.”

Of course the part of me that would like to boast is frustrated

Capital panto: Ricky Whittington surveys modern London’s malaises

December 30, 2016TheGuardian

A crack cast of millennial comics deliver social satire amid the poo jokes and spoof songs in an alt-panto created by Liam Williams and Daran Johnson

The “all-age family entertainment” of panto is being “doused with ill-disguised ordure,” protested one correspondent in the Guardian’s Letters page last week, in response to Michael Billington’s review of the London Palladium’s smutty Cinderella. Whatever would she make of Liam Williams and Daran Johnson’s Ricky Whittington and His Cat at the New Diorama: an alt-panto with poo jokes, crude social satire and featuring “fuck London!” as its most spirited refrain? It’s not for the kids, mind you: this Dick Whittington retread is aimed squarely at millennials and comedy fans, and – after two and a half hours of spoof fairytale and gentrification gags delivered by a crack cast of hip young comics – few will leave disappointed.

It’s great fun, in short. The animating idea – that the Dick Whittington story offers a bitterly ironic frame through which to view modern London’s various malaises – proves extremely fruitful, as Williams and Johnson’s show mocks the idea that the capital’s streets might be paved (for the newcomer at least) with anything other than exploitation, penury and angst. In King Rat, they find an easy metaphor for the kind of rapacious developer who wilfully degrades London’s housing stock, the easier to replace it with luxury flats when its occupiers are forced out. Whether, in real life, they do so by luring rats to their properties with cheese – well, you wouldn’t bet against it, would you?

Tristram Kenton’s stage photos of the year – in pictures

December 29, 2016TheGuardian

Tristram Kenton captures theatre, dance and comedy performances for the Guardian. Here are some of his best stage shots of 2016, from David Threlfall’s Don Quixote to Gemma Arterton’s Nell Gwynn

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