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Darren Harriott review – perky gags about Corbyn, the Queen and Rastafarianism

January 24, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The Edinburgh award-nominated standup develops a cheery rapport with the audience in this promising first show

If you want tragicomedy that cuts deep – or, for that matter, a misery memoir – Darren Harriott has got the raw material for it. But that’s not what he chooses to deliver with his maiden solo show, Defiant. Yes, he alludes to his father’s drug-dealing, mental illness and suicide. But there are dozens of other subjects over this magpie hour. This isn’t a show about his troubled backstory, or about anything else. It’s just a calling card, proving – with plenty to spare – that the perky 29-year-old can write and deliver fine jokes and establish a cheery rapport with a crowd.

Which is no mean feat – even if I want a little more over an hour of standup. Structure, maybe – but there’s none here, as the Black Country man flits between vaguely related topics at the same rhythm from start to finish. Point of view? Well, there are a few, but only ever to get Harriott from set-up to punchline. And every contentious opinion expressed is immediately reversed. He’s a remainer, but now he supports Brexit. He’s a republican, but here’s an instance when he loves the Queen. Or “I voted for Corbyn – but I don’t believe in him, man.” I longed for him to pin his colours to a mast. But he’s very personable company and has some excellent routines – like the one about Rastafarianism (his dad’s religion), or the sweet gag about confusing his libido with his craving for a sandwich.

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”).

The Big Burns Supper – in pictures

January 22, 2018TheGuardian

Dumfries celebrates the birth of Robert Burns with dance, theatre, live art and comedy, turning Burns Night into a festival of contemporary arts Continue reading…

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.

Jen Kirkman: ‘Joan Rivers was my comedy mother’

January 14, 2018TheGuardian

The US comic on her acid-tongued mentor, her British roots, not dating for a year and being caught up in the Louis CK scandal

Massachusetts-born, Los Angeles-based Jen Kirkman, 43, is a comedian, podcaster and bestselling author. On TV, she’s known for being a panellist on Chelsea Lately and narrator of Drunk History, while her podcast I Seem Fun gets 50,000 downloads per month. Her standup special Just Keep Livin’? recently arrived on Netflix and she brings her current tour to the UK in late January.

You’re coming over here to play a week of gigs…
I’m so excited. I’ve got some British heritage, actually. My uncle looked us up and the Kirkmans originated from Bury, outside of Manchester, before coming to America in the 19th century. I haven’t visited Bury yet but I’ve been to Manchester and loved it. They were a great audience. No offence but they seemed a little more loosened-up than in London. These are my people.

Twelve years ago, Louis CK said something creepy to me which definitely tallies with things he’s since admitted to

Lucy Pearman: ‘I gave Mick Quinn from Supergrass one very big testicle’

January 12, 2018TheGuardian

The standup and one half of sketch duo LetLuce on the things that make her laugh the most Continue reading…

‘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.

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