Lily Phillips, Monkey Barrel ★★★★
Lily Phillips is keen to tell us at the top of her show that she’s not that Lily Phillips. There’s no OnlyFans content in Crying but, dealing as it does with her experience of having a baby, it’s graphic in a different way. So strap in.
She tells the story from conception to childbirth and also talks about IVF and being part of a National Childbirth Trust group – or a “diverse group of white, middle-class women”, as the comic drily describes it.
It takes real skill to tell a personal story like this and keep everyone, male and female, parents and non-parents, on board but Phillips does, as she punctuates the narrative with lots of laughs. Even the more serious stuff is leavened by a gag to follow.
It’s not just bodily functions and biology that she is truthful about; her experience of childbirth was traumatic – not helped by doctors ignoring her (as it turned out) justified fears over her baby’s condition.
She also has something to say about the fluffy nonsense surrounding pregnancy and childbirth that is just not true for so many women. It’s an entertaining – and moving – story, very well told.
Ayoade Bamgboye, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★
Ayoade Bamgboye starts Swings and Roundabouts by giving her technician a hard time. But that’s because the Londoner of Nigerian heritage has a sense of entitlement, given to her by parents who told her she could be anything she wanted.
But when she moved to London she found that being female and black might thwart her ambitions and in this entertaining hour – a mix of storytelling, observational comedy and even a bit of (beautiful) singing – she tells her story.
It starts in the Co-op in London, takes in her Lagos childhood, the death of her father and her emotional struggles.
There’s a slight sense of danger as you don’t know where this energetic young woman might go next. Her crowd work, which is excellent, went slightly awry the night I saw the show, but she just powered through, breaking the conceit to tell us we had given the wrong answers, and she would just carry on.
The narrative doesn’t quite hang together and the ending is abrupt, but it’s so enjoyably daft that the audience runs with it. And my goodness, can Bamgboye entertain in an hour that races by. It’s a memorable debut.
