Ivo Graham's latest show The Game of Life follows on from his previous hour, in which he talked about passing a milestone in life and the prospect of starting a family.
Lou Sanders has named her latest show (which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe) Say Hello to Your New Step-Mummy. But, as she tells us in her opening comments, she's not a mother or stepmother, and hasn't yet met a father she likes, but “by the end of the year, God willing…”
David Baddiel is a very fine comic, and over the past few years has become an acclaimed author of children's books. So I'm genuinely sad to say that his debut play at Soho Theatre really isn't very good. God's Dice does have its moments, for sure, and some laughs, but at two hours, 15 minutes it's massively overlong and over blown.
Shuck 'n' Jive is an hour-long two-hander about writing a play about being black in a white industry. The industry? Theatre. Performance. The stage.
It’s now Edinburgh Fringe transfer season in London, but here’s one they made earlier: Cora Bissett’s Fringe First-winning autobiographical play from the 2018 Festival about her time in 1990s indie band Darlingheart. Though the broad shape of this tale is familiar, Bissett’s gig-theatre approach lends it a raw authenticity and engaging confessional quality.
Memory is a funny thing: it can get you through exams; it can comfort you or distress you; it can last a lifetime or go in an instant. In Sofie Hagen's case, her idiosyncratic one has provided material for her new show Bumswing, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe and is now at Soho Theatre.
If good intentions were all, The View UpStairs would be Gypsy. As it is, the European premiere of this 2017 Off Broadway musical set in a New Orleans gay bar firebombed by arson in 1973 serves both as an important reminder of a grievous event in LGBTQ history and as an object lesson in the difficulty of writing a persuasive show.
This witty street-smart play about a white-skinned boy born to a mixed-race mother deploys its narrative with the dexterity of a dance. Two performers move backwards and forwards across the stage, switching through different characters, skin colours, genders and generations, as they tell a story of pride, poverty, passion and prejudice.
How to describe a show that by Robin Ince’s own admission doesn’t have a narrative strand, and for which he has written several pages of notes that he gets through only a small section of? Well here goes: he calls the show a mash-up of the two cultures of art and science in a celebration of the human mind, and Chaos of Delight is very well named.
There has been a trend in stand-up comedy in recent years for intensely personal shows, confessional even, but it’s the comic’s life that is usually the one being examined for comedic effect. With Arthur Smith’s latest show at Soho Theatre, however, it is his dad’s life being described here, and what a life.