Soho Theatre

Two women meet and fall so hard for each they begin to lose their own identities in this short play from first time playwright Jess Edwards, which explores ‘queer love, coercive control, and the physics of connection’. Annie Kershaw dirercts the cast of Patricia Allison and Stefanie Martini.

The one-night stand is comedy’s gift that keeps on giving: a pressure cooker of intimacy, regret, hope and awkward logistics. David Ireland’s Most Favoured takes that familiar morning-after scenario and, then twists it into something weirder. The short show premiered in Scotland in 2013 and was memorably billed a ‘theatrical snack’. Now Most Favoured get its London premiere at Soho Theatre, in a new production, but still clocking in at a brisk 45 minutes. Director Max Elton confines the production to set designer Ceci Calf’s nondescript, three-star-looking hotel room: a timber bed frame and rumpled sheets wrapped in a striped polyester bed-runner. In this anonymous space, Mike (Alexander Arnold) drifts nonchalantly around the hotel room, while Mary (Lauren Lyle) is exhilarated. She reveals that she has, for the first time in her life, felt loved, and she is determined to make Mike understand the significance of that fact. He, however, has also experienced a first: he’s tried KFC, and is understandably fixated on the finger lickin’ goodness. That bucket of chicken becomes the play’s central running joke and, eventually, its structural crutch. The awkwardness escalates when Mary reveals why she has been picking up men for at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (I mean, where else do people find ‘glamourous’ specimens — I mean, men — with good genes?) The pair function as effective foils. Lyle gives Mary unfiltered, Glaswegian charm, shot through with moments of genuine,...

Concept comedy lunatic Adam Riches has deployed a Sharpe-era Sean Bean impression throughout his career, and now he brings it back for what is here described as a ‘(k)night of chaotic buffoonery, to give you bastards a Christmas present you’ll never forget’. We wouldn't want to speculate on what it literally consists of, although we’re led to believe games may be involved. 

Nigerian standup Bamgboye took the best newcomer award at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Swings and Roundabouts her debut show which charted her move to the UK in her twenties, and showcased her often disorientating mastery of accents. Critics praised her confidence, poise and original, outsider-ish eye on British culture.