We'd expect Alexander Bennett’s I Can’t Stand The Man, Myself to be an extremely deprecatory set, like the title would suggest. In fact, it’s a very honest critique, not only about himself, but about wider issues that whittles down into an exploration about the complexity and nuance that accompanies life instead of the good vs bad polarity that permeates most narratives.
Liz Guterbock: Geriatric Millennial
Liz Guterbock's Geriatric Millennial uses the innocuous lens of the term to explore society's attitudes to women, in particular childlessness and ageing and intersperses these subjects with innocuous observations about the differences between British and American cultures.
Philip Kostelecky: Daddy’s Home
Philip Kostelecky’s Daddy’s Home is an extraordinarily strong Fringe debut. It’s a casually fun hour that is performed with a kind of boundless energy that does in fact lift the atmosphere in the venue exponentially.
Niamh Denyer: Get Blessed
The small business seminar industry will never be the same again after Niamh Denyer’s Get Blessed, a satirical character piece that centres around a workshop about the best way to throw a funeral. We are taken through a comically dry and self-aware hour of gags aimed at the ‘add-ons industry’.
Trust
Gossip Girl, Succession and now Trust. All of these shows are part of a curiously morbid fascination that fiction has with the upper-classes; the wealth, status and drama of the world that these characters inhabit. Written by Nicole Sellew and Natalie Westgor, on the surface this show seems to attempt to analyse privilege and its harms, but the constant drama, lack of remorse and severe unlikeability of all of the characters means that we’re subsequently pulled into a melodrama.