Soho Theatre

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe This rousing monologue from actor Jade Franks has been a stonking hit this Fringe, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s an enthusiastically told fish-out-of-water story based on working-class Liverpudlian Franks’s - dare I say it - Legally Blonde-esque experience of going to study at Cambridge. You sense she’s probably taken a few liberties with a narrative that isn’t entirely watertight. But it is, nonetheless, a thoroughly winning hour. Working in a Liverpool call centre, the young Franks is piqued by an encounter with a testy posh customer who assumes she’s thick – so she decides she’ll go to Cambridge, crafts a banging statement, and then boom, off she goes. Clad in falsies and tight gymware, Franks is an ebullient hurricane, winning us to her side by sheer force of personality. I would say it feels like she lays her Eliza Doolittle credentials on a bit thick: the show implies she was going to spend her life working in a call centre until a random phone encounter led to her not only deciding to go to uni, but Cambridge to boot. I’d assume there’s more to it than that, and that she’s upped the fairytale factor in the name of entertainment – I could be off the mark but it sort of bothered me that the show feels so manipulative at points. A bit of artistic license is fine, and the show really comes into its own when she arrives in Cambridge and gets a job to supplement her studies (a big no no, and the fact ). The...

Nigerian standup Bamgboye took the best newcomer award at the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe with her debut show Swings and Roundabouts 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 and it bagged her a place in the starting line up for Saturday Night Live UK, with this latest Soho Theatre run meaning she is possibly the first member of the line-up to return to liver perfomance (it’s also not 100% clear if the Saturday night show will actually happen, given the live sketch show has extended beyond its original run and is due to be on that night).

Veiled in slightly performative secrecy, Flo & Joan’s Edinburgh Fringe hit One Man Musical is concerned with a very specific man: in the interests of playing along we won’t name him here, but let’s just say that his greatest hits as a composer of musical theatre include Cats, Evita and Starlight Express.  Prior to 2026 the show had only been performed by George Fouracres, the comic actor who has gone on to be the breakout star of SNL UK. There’s currently no cast announcement and it seems possible Fouracres could do it – it’s running at the same time as a lot of his colleages are making a brief return to stand-up. But certainly it’s currently unconfirmed.

Ania Magliano has been working up to A-lister stand-up status throughout her twenties, which are still very much an ongoing concern. She might have made it anyway, but stints on Taskmaster and Saturday Night Live UK have made her veritably superstar adjacant as she returns with her first new show in a couple of years. Her schtick very much revolves around laidback anecdotes and observations, but it’s her gossipy, conspiratorial delivery and send up of Gen Z moralising that defines her brilliance.

Existentialist Jewish-American comic Edelman finally follows up his glorious Just for Us – which documented his somewhat hamfisted infiltration of a white power group – with a brand new show that plays a few London dates before heading to the Fringe. We’re unclear if this one comes with any great concept but we’re told contents include ‘things like seashells, an amputee hospital in Jerusalem, various deities and our personal responsibilities amidst global conflict’.

If you know Christopher Brett Bailey you will surely know him for 2014’s This Is How We Die, a hallucinatory, hilarious beat poetry-style road trip monologue that ended in an awesome roar of sound as the show – hitherto just Bailey at a desk – morphed into a cacophonous post rock gig.  There have been other lower-key projects since, plus at least one major dead end in the form of Carnival: At the End of Days, a film the Canada-born, US-raised, London-resident Bailey co-wrote with Terry Gilliam (it has suffered the fate of many Terry Gilliam films and seems unlikely to ever in fact be made).   But it’s probably reasonable to call I Saw Satan at the 7-Eleven Bailey’s first major live show since This Is How We Die (which toured for years).  Viewed through a strict theatre lens, there hasn’t been a huge amount of progression since TIHWD: it’s Bailey sitting at a desk again, delivering a hallucinatory road trip monologue again, only without the rock gig bit this time (select performances including the press night do include a batshit coda: it would be unfair to spoil the surprise and weird to discuss it as part of the show when it usually isn’t). But that’s not a particularly fair way of looking at it, I don’t think. With his mad-scientist hair and mad-scientist stare and general mad-scientist vibes all round, Bailey is a compelling live presence. He is, however, a guy sitting at a desk reading from typed pages (we know they’re not just a prop because he points out some typos)....