Points of view: theatre, comedy and news
The saying ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ couldn’t be more applicable to Jack Grossman and Zoe Wohlfeld’s A Night Of Drama. What starts off as a perhaps Renaissance-esque, Athenian public square practice of bringing a meritocratic, Speakers’ Corner element to theatre quickly devolves into a Hobbesian thought experiment that perhaps best exemplifies why Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is still very applicable.
Live performance is one of the best forms of escapism. This rule is perpetuated by Thor Stenhaug’s debut, One Night Stand Baby, an effortlessly funny and clever hour of the purest form of comedy. It’s just a very solid hour of good humour and exquisite comedic craftsmanship that should be on everyone’s list this Fringe.
I left Josie Long’s Now Is The Time Of Monsters shell-shocked and with the understanding that I have greatly underestimated just how stand-up can make me feel. It’s such a powerful hour full of off-beat, effortless and deeply funny comedy, that speaks to something bigger and leaves us with a tonne of questions to reflect on to the point where we feel everything that Long says in the depths of our souls.
Jain Edwards’ She Devil is an admittedly relevant piece of theatre that uses understated character comedy to convey a deeply personal and somewhat political hour of stand-up. It’s definitely an interesting concept, but overall She-Devil doesn’t quite deliver on what we would assume the promise and premise of this show to be.
Whatever we may have been expecting from Glenn Moore’s new hour, Please Sir, Glenn I Have Some Moore, our expectations are far exceeded by what we bear witness to onstage. It’s certainly a frenetic and intense hour where Moore pushes what is possible from a comedy show to the extreme, to the point where it becomes everything that we may want from a comedy show.
In the run-up to the Fringe, Andy Barr took a moment to answer some questions from Pepper&Salt about ‘The Hotly-Anticipated 4th Debut Hour from Rising Star, Andy Barr’, his new show. This hotly anticipated interview covers Barr’s new show, character comedy and what it is like to procrastinate your Edinburgh Fringe debut.
Pepper & Salt 