Soho Theatre

‘What does it mean to feel strong?’ ask Eugénie Pastor and Shamira Turner, as they gracelessly crawl out from behind a black backdrop at Soho Theatre Upstairs. It’s a question that they, the French-English gig-theatre duo She Goat, have been pondering a lot recently. Life events and the realities of ageing have left them not feeling particularly strong, the pair explain. Really, it feels like their bodies are ‘stuck on a decay trajectory’. But what if there was a world – a fantasy world – where they could transform themselves into Xena: Warrior Princess, and the other heroes they grew up admiring? That’s the quest She Goat are taking us along with in Iron Fantasy: their hero’s journey to become buff and protect themselves from the past, present and future. Through song and movement – Turner on the autoharp, Pastor on the flute, both on the electronic controller pad – they create a chaotic yet tender meditation on strength that is sweet and funny but unafraid to dabble in the profound. Initially, it’s the laughs She Goat are here to mine. Dressed in old school PE kits (white polo shirts, high-waisted black shorts), they clamber over each other to share juvenile ideas of what strength means, which we find out are taken from their interviews with children. As adults, strength obviously means something different. But when you picture someone strong, you’re more likely to envisage a Viking than Turner and Pastor – even if, as they joke, they too are ‘European and entering our...

For the first 15 minutes or so, I thought I had Welcome to Pemfort’s number. Sarah Power’s play presents as a cosily familiar comedy about a clutch of small-town eccentrics pulling together in an effort to stage a fundraising fun day for the titular medieval fort (not a castle!) that forms the chief point of interest in their sleepy town. And Power has crafted a classic trio of oddballs: dotty older lady boss Uma (Debra Gillett), autistic nerd Glenn (Ali Hadji-Heshmati) and hippyish Ria (Lydia Larson), who believes she’s made friends with a deer. The three of them run Pemfort in relative harmony. But it’s the hire of Sean Delaney’s ex-con Kurtis that starts the real story, the quirky villager tropes used as cover to ask some very hard questions about community and forgiveness. Curtis is a good-hearted, sensitive person who has done the work, wants to be better and wholeheartedly regrets the terrible crime he committed as a young man (exactly what it was we only discover around the halfway point). But his arrival is, nonetheless, a seismic event for the small community. Really, Power’s play is a meditation on human nature and the ability to forgive, magnified through the lens of smalltown life, where every addition to the community is scrutinised and dwelt upon. Clearly Kurtis deserves to be given a second chance. But is it realistic to think he’ll get one? Should he have simply lied about his past? These are hard, painful questions that Power asks unsparingly while also,...

Andrew Doherty’s idiosyncratic folk horror comedy Gay Witch Sex Cult was one of the most arresting stand up debuts at last year’s Fringe. And its follow up Sad Gay AIDS Play is a lot of fun. But it also sails into tropier waters than its predecessor, and though hardly a run of the mill stand up show, it does feel like it’s treading on some pretty well worn ground. Doherty again plays a preeningly precious and self-regarding version of himself, now attempting to write a follow up to last year’s hit. Unfortunately his wealthy parents are refusing to bankroll him this time, so he’s turned to the Arts Council England, who have no interest in the creepy Six-esque musical he wants to write. But upon hearing he’s gay, ACE suggests in the strongest possible terms that he write a play about AIDS. Doherty goes about all this very amusingly, and his secret weapon is his own stage persona. Weasley, brittle and self justifying, making art for all the wrong reasons, secure in the knowledge that mummy and daddy’s money will bail him out if things go south - it’s depressingly but hilariously acute satire. But a bad taste play about AIDS? In 2025? Really? Team America’s ‘Everyone Has AIDS’ was 21 years ago and it’s decades on from the flowering of the great AIDS related dramas. It’s an absurdly anachronistic provocation – a handful of off-colour jokes about The Troubles feel edgier. Likewise the bit where he throws in a scene about a simple working class lad from Newcastle because ACE...

A hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Hannah Caplan’s debut play is a headspinning meta-drama that follows Grace and Eli, a pair of friends in their mid-twenties whose relationshop becomes very intense and then falls apart. In order to makes sense of it all, Grace decides to write a play about it… but what’s true and what’s imagined beginsto blur alarmingly. Douglas Clarke-Wood directs.

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In this sweet debut Fringe hour,  Lewisham-born-and-bred stand up Toussaint Douglass threatens us with 55 minutes of jokes about pigeons.  As a stickler for high-concept shows, I was a little disappointed to discover this was a colossal overstatement: there’s maybe 15 minutes on the ubiquitous winged rats. But they’re 15 good minutes, not least the show’s brilliantly chaotic cold open where Douglass makes one audience member drive a stuffed pigeon strapped to a remote control car around the room while others are made to try and feed it bread. For the most part Accessible Pigeon Material is a show about Douglass and his family, though he has a pleasingly idiosyncratic way of approaching what might otherwise be fairly humdrum material. There’s some great gags about Lewisham and some charming stuff about living with his ‘87-year-old flatmate’ (ie his nan, for whom pigeons were emblematic of the UK when she arrived with the Windrush generation). Best of all is a sequence where he roleplays his geezerish father while an audience member is forced to play the part of a younger Douglass trying to get his pathologically undemonstrative old man to say ‘I love you’. That this last gag isn’t pursued with quite the self lacerating viciousness it could be is indicative of the fact that Douglass basically seems like a really nice guy, making a show about the things that interest him (which includes pigeons). Perhaps he’d benefit...

Christopher Brett Bailey made a big underground stir with his 2014 show This Is How We Die, a remarkable mash up of bug-eyed beat poetry and roaring post-rock gig. He’s had various projects since – notably his collaboration with Sleepwalk Collective, Psychodrama – and This Is How We Die has a long tail, eventually being performed on such rarified stages as the Almeida and Berlin’s Schaubuhne. So there’s not been a 12-year absence, but at the same time I Saw Satan at the 7-Eleven is kind of a follow up, a stage adaptation of his own novel that does indeed detail its narrator’s encounter with Beelzebub at a popular American convenience store. Expect intense, surreal poetics from the Jack White of the spoken word.

Tender reunites US playwright Dave Harris and Brit director Matthew Xia, who had such a wonderful collaboration with Stratford Theatre’s batshit Tambo & Bones. This new one concerns an ailing strip club, whose owner’s daughter decrees its needs a drastic glow up.