Soho Theatre

Set in a small village in pre-partition India, this new play from women-led touring company The Thelmas follows two young female friends – one Muslim, one Sikh – who are at risk of being separated amidst political turmoil - so they do something drastic. Santi & Naz is written by Guleraana Mir and Afshan D’souza-Lodhi, and directed by Madelaine Moore. 

This review is from the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe. What a title: in a world where comedy shows can have borderline meaningless conceits attached to them, ‘The Good Place’ writer Demi Adejuyigbe’s debut Fringe show offers us the pure promise of at least one honest piece of entertainment. WouId I pay to see a trained acrobat do a single backflip? No. Would I pay to see an untrained comedian do one? I think I would! The flip is both heavily teased and cleverly not made overly central to what is essentially an hour of imaginative, multimedia0-enhanced sketch comedy masquerading as a confessional solo show. In brief, Adejuyigbe wants to impress his ‘crush’ by doing said backflip, but she’s not here yet: she’s at a celebrity party he wasn’t invited to. And so he’s going to give us a presentation that runs the gamut from a parody of songs that parody ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ to an invitation for a member of the audience to punch him in the stomach. It’s all very DIY but it’s also slickly entertaining – I wouldn’t say it’s exactly apolitical but I would say that you can absolutely see why the man was hired to work on a quirky but populist multi Emmy-nominated comedy smash. As for the backflip - well, I’m not going to spoiler what happens exactly, but it manages to be both an allegory for artistic vulnerability and forging ahead against the odds… and a really intentionally stupid momen. You’ll see more self-consciously important comedy shows this Fringe, but few more out and out fun.

Amy Gledhill’s second solo show won the main comedy award at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. A brief initial Soho Theatre stint for her widely praised set revolving around questions of body image sold out instantly, but now she’s back with a bigger run in Soho’s biggest theatre.

Following previous cult hits Pansexual Pirate Pregnancy and Lesbian Space Crime (oh yes), Airlock Theatre returns with another comedy play cut from what sounds like exactly the same cloth. Count Dykula follows the eponymous trainee vampire, whose butchness and lack of thirsty for blood make it hard for her to fit in at vampire university. But she’s determined to prove that she can be a vampire on her terms.

This review is from the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. High-concept verging on slightly terrifying, comic Jordan Brookes’s latest is show is about the not uncommon subject of getting older. Kind of. In a way. Brookes’s response to the ongoing passing of his thirties is, apparently, to get really into the story of the RMS Titanic, ‘because that’s the sort of thing that people do’. Perversely, Fontanelle takes its name from a digressionary passage in which Brookes goes off on one about his fascination with the titular soft bit of babies’ heads and how if adults still had it, it would probably get used as a really dumb suicide button. If we’re saying everything has its place here, then I think the inference is the Titanic is what Brookes has gotten into in lieu of having children of his own to focus on. But that may be overthinking it. And the show really is quite a lot about the Titanic.  Coming out wearing what turns out to be a miniature captain’s hat the actual boat, the film and most crucially the relatively obscure stage musical all feature heavily in the material. Brookes apparently made a three hour round trip to see the musical in Southampton and thought it was shit, and therefore decided he'd write his own, which we’re subjected to in increasingly larger, madder doses as the show wears on. There are things about Fontanelle that it would be unfair to spoil. But easiest to say that it’s remarkable Brookes thinks of this stuff and even more so that he has managed to...

‘It is possible to be desperately sad and have fun at the same time’ declare Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole in Sh!t Theatre’s Or What’s Left of Us, and what a mantra that proves to be.  Their first Fringe show is since the pandemic is the wilfully shambolic alt theatre duo’s ‘Nebraska’ or ‘On the Beach’ – a stripped back, folk-inflected work made in response to heartache that is, nonetheless, an essential part of their peerless back catalogue.  At several points, they reference the title – which is best read as Sh!t Theatre (Or What’s Left of Us) – in saying that this isn’t ‘true’ Sh!t Theatre, because things have changed. But when your oeuvre takes in a show about Dolly Parton and mortality (DollyWould), a show about expat culture and state-sanctioned killings in Malta (Sh!t Theatre Drink Run with Expats) and most recently one about Eva Perron and the duo’s doubt about their future (Evita Too) then their latest’s blend of folk music and grief is hardly a stretch.  Indeed, superficially it’s classic Sh!ts, featuring the duo in costume – sort of mediaeval peasant garb with occasional ‘Wicker Man’-style animal heads – and singing songs while regaling us with some recent japes they had (that inevitably take on a deeper meaning as the show wears on).  In this case, they were sad so they really got into folk: much of the show is based around their account of a visit to a legendary Yorkshire folk club, plus various spin off events from their ‘folk revival period’: going...

Cat Cohen has become something of a comedy superstar with her two hit shows The Twist… ? She’s Gorgeous and Come For Me – plus last year’s album OVERDRESSED – and despite being about as American as it’s physically possible to be, the singing comic has long been a success over here, from Edinburgh Fringe beginnings to apperances on various beloved panel shows and podcasts. Now she’s back in town trying out something new for a couple of weeks: at time of writing there were still a few tickets left for most of these intimate dates.

Part of the burgeoning genre of one-woman shows that send up one-woman shows, Temi Wilkey’s 2024 hit Main Character Energy sees the co-founder of Pecs drag king collective attempt to get to grips with her own insatiable desire for stardom.