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.
Improv is always a huge risk to go to as an audience member, just because there’s such a wild and fluctuating difference in quality that can occur. That being said, Holy Shit Improv is pretty much as safe a bet as you can make with this genre. I have never laughed as hard or for as long as I did during this show, there’s just no way to stop laughing at what occurs onstage.
The wonderful thing about theater is that we can really build the world that we want with it, to draw and establish connections between topics that in any other format would be tenuous. The exception to this rule seems to be ALL Productions’ My Blood, and its connection to the Oresteia is perhaps as distant as the Percy Jackson films are to the books.
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.
Initially unassuming, Claire Parry’s Boorish Trumpson is an example of how art can surprise you.
Have you ever wondered how sea creatures must feel about the destruction of their ecosystems? Well, Zoë Bullock’s Gracie and the Start of the End of The World (Again) might just answer that question. It’s a creative and funny story that balances the humour and devastating throughout.
The journey of self-discovery and realization that Alexis Gay’s Unprofessional tries to takes us on is instead a forced show that tries to be more interesting than it actually is. Underlying Gay's main narrative of her time working in Silicon Valley and the professional culture that she experienced, is a an exploration of the correlation between self-worth and outside approval through the lens .
Going into the theater, we're all vaguely familiar with the fundamentals ingrained in British institutions, but our exposure to it is usually quite abstract and at a distance. Tom Greaves’ FUDGEY is a comment on the problem at the heart of British private schools and so brings an immediacy and additional layer of understanding to the flawed system within these institutions.
Death and the afterlife are quite unlikely topics or sources of humour for a stand-up comedy show, just from the juxtaposition alone. Rich Spalding’s debut hour Gather Your Skeletons not only proves that this is a false premise - or at least the exception to the rule - throughout the rest of the hour, that is full to the brim of good-natured humour and amusement.
Chris Weir’s Well-Flung is a nice story of self-exploration, but it isn’t much more than that. He is so concerned with getting through the narrative, that he doesn’t really stop to consider how it affects the comedy, and we can often go for long-stretches without any humorous break in the story.
Pepper & Salt 