Points of view: theatre, comedy and news
Edy Hurst’s Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Himself is proof that you can really tie anything together to form a conspiracy theory and make it mean anything. This is just a very fun show, where exaggeration and irony pervade the humour and create this comically spooky, mad-cap adventure.
My MILF-Shake Brings All The Boys To The Yard is a sarcasm-littered show where Ellen unpacks and openly discusses everything from the concept of MILF-dom to therapy, using visual aides to signpost throughout her show. In the use of the doctor’s report, there’s almost an attempt to explain the context behind the words of this report. This show certainly goes in unexpected directions before coming round again with a logic maybe only Ellen can see. The topics aren’t always engaging, but they’re certainly unique. She comes up with these elaborate jokes that come together very creatively at the end, a payoff she spends the entire showing setting up.
Titi Lee’s Good Girl Gone Baddie plays with the stand-up art form in ways that we’re perhaps not so familiar with, piling on material that aren’t necessarily relevant or substantive to push Lee’s overall throughline, which because of everything else going on, isn’t particularly clear either.
Jane Bramwell’s and Michael Brand’s Wallis is an escape into a world of decadence and understated glamour through which we’re given a hole in the 4th wall from which to get a glimpse into the social weavings of the British upper class.
William Shakespeare’s plays have been staged and re-staged time and time again, in many different forms, settings, genres, each theater company trying to bring something new to an age-old and familiar story. Shadow Road’s Macbeth Sleep No More is the latest attempt at trying to present a new interpretation of a story so old that it has its own superstition attached to it.
Friendship break-ups are more common than we think and we don’t talk about them. In Nobody’s Talking About Jamie (Taylor’s Version) Jamie Finn blows the lid on this topic and brings it into the light (onstage), and explores the idea how someone can be the most important part of your life to suddenly not having a role in it.
Academically speaking, climate change is considered a ‘complex problem’. This means that there isn’t a simple solution, and will require actions from a cross-section of international actors to solve, an abstract problem with no one solution. This is the challenge that Lewis Hetherington’s No One Is Coming To Save US faces, as it brings a relatively abstract concept to life onstage.
It’s not 100% clear how or why Alexandra Haddow defines Third Party the way that she does, but the way that she does it is quite reductive to a point. This show covers two different parts of comedy - political and personal - where one topic is exponentially and noticeably better than the other.
It’s always curious to see how universal themes are analysed, translated and reimagined in a modern context, especially the medium of political satire; how a story becomes relevant to each new generation regardless of time period. The Edinburgh University Savoy Group’s take on Biolanthe - Fraser Grant and Rosalyn Harper’s adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe - is a funny if somewhat uneven performance. With updated lyrics by Lewis Eggeling, this show has moments of genuine hilarity that are funny for the sake of being funny rather than humour that occurs because of a sense of existentialism or brush with reality.
Pepper & Salt 