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Garry Starr Performs Everything review – theatre saviour’s complete works of silliness

August 7, 2018TheGuardian

Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh
Damien Warren-Smith’s alter ego delivers a drama masterclass, leading us from clownish chaos to feats of comic genius

‘Theatre is dying. Garry is our only hope,” we’re told. Arriving in Edinburgh with considerable buzz from the Melbourne and Brighton festivals, Damien Warren-Smith’s show – like Jon Pointing’s last year – is comic catnip for theatre people, and a hoot for everyone else. Warren-Smith plays Garry Starr: gangly of limb, quivering with sincerity, and frequently stripped down to nothing but the ruff around his neck. He’s here to rescue forsaken theatre by demonstrating every one of its genres in 60 minutes. He manages 13, by which time the clownish chaos has reached a dizzying pitch.

The idea, he tells us, is to breathe life back into an art form that’s been hollowed out by his bete noire, and supposed former employer, the RSC. So here is Starr playing Pinter with an audience stooge, and being very particular about the famous pause. Euro-theatre is represented by a contemporary-dance Kafka. Slapstick descends into barely choreographed violence involving Starr, four punters and several floppy foam pipes.

Garry Starr Performs Everything review – theatre saviour’s complete works of silliness

August 7, 2018TheGuardian

Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh
Damien Warren-Smith’s alter ego delivers a drama masterclass, leading us from clownish chaos to feats of comic genius

‘Theatre is dying. Garry is our only hope,” we’re told. Arriving in Edinburgh with considerable buzz from the Melbourne and Brighton festivals, Damien Warren-Smith’s show – like Jon Pointing’s last year – is comic catnip for theatre people, and a hoot for everyone else. Warren-Smith plays Garry Starr: gangly of limb, quivering with sincerity, and frequently stripped down to nothing but the ruff around his neck. He’s here to rescue forsaken theatre by demonstrating every one of its genres in 60 minutes. He manages 13, by which time the clownish chaos has reached a dizzying pitch.

The idea, he tells us, is to breathe life back into an art form that’s been hollowed out by his bete noire, and supposed former employer, the RSC. So here is Starr playing Pinter with an audience stooge, and being very particular about the famous pause. Euro-theatre is represented by a contemporary-dance Kafka. Slapstick descends into barely choreographed violence involving Starr, four punters and several floppy foam pipes.

Jordan Brookes review – digressive, demented and deeply unsettling

August 6, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The self-proclaimed ‘riskiest comic in the biz’ is playing with our heads again, and this time the stakes are higher and the thrills greater

‘I’m the riskiest comic in the biz,” Jordan Brookes boasts in his new show, Bleed. Then he tells us again, and again, until the phrase collapses into gibberish, and his self-esteem collapses, too. Last year’s gripping show Body of Work, nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award, had many hailing Brookes in just those terms. But on the evidence of this follow-up, which is even better, success won’t go to his head. There can’t be much room in there, after all, what with self-loathing, images of violence, playful impulses and limitless ideas for how to subvert a comedy show all jostling for attention.

You’ll learn more than you want to about what his orgasm sounds like

Maureen Lipman Is ‘Up for It’ review – big personalities, old jokes and smooth music

August 6, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly George Square Theatre, Edinburgh
The actor and comedian’s lucky dip of a show offers sketches, songs – and a controversial take on #MeToo

‘Old-fashioned,” Maureen Lipman calls herself at the start of Up for It, and the term certainly applies to her show, a medley of music and standup, character comedy and counter-revolutionary views on #MeToo. It is, she says, the kind of cabaret that she and co-star, jazz singer Jacqui Dankworth, would enjoy, and will likewise appeal to anyone drawn to big personalities, old jokes and music so smooth you could slide a whisky tumbler down it.

Lipman starts as she means to go on, mixing self-deprecation (“You thought your wife had booked to see Su Pollard”) with steely self-regard. “People like me, we’re shunted aside these days,” she complains, notwithstanding her casting last week in Coronation Street. There follows a monologue about 21st-century telly, in which Miriam Margolyes farts her way around the world and Lipman hosts a show called Walking with Wrinklies.

Maureen Lipman Is ‘Up for It’ review – big personalities, old jokes and smooth music

August 6, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly George Square Theatre, Edinburgh
The actor and comedian’s lucky dip of a show offers sketches, songs – and a controversial take on #MeToo

‘Old-fashioned,” Maureen Lipman calls herself at the start of Up for It, and the term certainly applies to her show, a medley of music and standup, character comedy and counter-revolutionary views on #MeToo. It is, she says, the kind of cabaret that she and co-star, jazz singer Jacqui Dankworth, would enjoy, and will likewise appeal to anyone drawn to big personalities, old jokes and music so smooth you could slide a whisky tumbler down it.

Lipman starts as she means to go on, mixing self-deprecation (“You thought your wife had booked to see Su Pollard”) with steely self-regard. “People like me, we’re shunted aside these days,” she complains, notwithstanding her casting last week in Coronation Street. There follows a monologue about 21st-century telly, in which Miriam Margolyes farts her way around the world and Lipman hosts a show called Walking with Wrinklies.

Harry and Chris review – romantic pandas and ice-cream puns in jaunty comedy hour

August 6, 2018TheGuardian

Just the Tonic at the Mash House, Edinburgh
So long as you can avoid making the inevitable Concords comparison, this peppy musical duo delivers some pleasantly diverting songs

Joke that you’re “the nation’s favourite comedy rap-jazz duo” and you’re bound to recall “New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk parody act” – as if it weren’t hard enough already for musical comedy duos to escape Flight of the Conchords’ shadow. But Harry Baker and Chris Read have made waves over the last year (Radio 2 appearances; guest slots on Russell Howard’s Sky show) with their brand of peppy comic song, and, provided you put Conchords comparisons to the back of your mind, their latest fringe offering makes for a pleasantly diverting hour.

There’s no edge whatsoever to what they do, and at points the show shades into blandness. It’s not clear what distinctive new qualities they bring to the musical comedy party. Their songs range frictionlessly across subjects from the romantic lives of pandas to the woes of supporting the England football team. When they do address something contentious – the spectre of terrorism in their final song, for example – they reap platitudes (“Fear only has the power we give it,” runs their wholesome refrain).

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.

I asked my mum to be in my YouTube videos. Now she’s a Bollywood star

August 4, 2018TheGuardian

When the comedian Mawaan Rizwan put his mother Shahnaz into his videos, they were an instant hit. And then Bollywood came calling…

In 2012, the comedian Mawaan Rizwan was making videos for YouTube and gaining modest success. One day, he found himself in need of a stooge for his latest sketch, so he roped in his mum, Shahnaz.

The resulting video, My Mum Hates Me, in which the two of them banter back and forth about all the ways in which they annoy each other, took off in a way he’d never experienced. “That got 115,078 views,” he says. “So we did loads more sketches. In one of them, she dressed up as a goth, in another she was a midwife.”

She had always been very strict and focused on our schoolwork, but when she acted in my videos, I saw her in a new light

Adam Hess: ‘I once dreamed I was a germ in Richard Gere’s bloodstream’

August 3, 2018TheGuardian

The standup comedian and bitcoin speculator on the things that make him laugh the most

Modern Toss on Edinburgh fringe

Rob Brydon’s Making Divorce Work (as Keith Barret). I used to read it in the break room when I worked in Boots because nobody talked to me, and then I realised that people didn’t want to talk to me because they thought I was a 19-year-old divorcee.

‘She’s got no filter’: the standup who let a six-year-old write his comedy show

August 3, 2018TheGuardian

Giving his partner’s daughter free rein during the creative process has resulted in Owen Roberts’ most surreal show to date – and the sort of laughs other comics at Edinburgh dream of

In a sweaty Portakabin in Edinburgh, a standup makes his entrance to Let It Go from Frozen. He is dressed as a chicken, complete with feather boa and yellow tights, and before long is clucking among the audience, dancing and laying eggs. This, explains standup Owen Roberts, is what happens when you let a six-year-old girl create your fringe comedy show.

The idea came to Roberts, who usually performs with the sketch trio Beasts, when he was trying to write his first solo material. After spending the day in front of a blank computer screen, he went to pick up his partner’s garrulous daughter, Isabella, from school. Isabella, he realised, was full of imagination and energy. Could she rescue him in this moment of desperation? After all, he helps her with her homework.

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