Soho Theatre

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Joe Kent-Waters’s second show is exactly what I wanted it to be, which is to say that it’s basically a bigger budget remake of his first show.  In case you missed it, Kent-Waters made a huge impression at last year’s Fringe – winning the Best Newcomer award – with his creation Frankie Monroe, a hulking, gravelly-voiced, white-faced men’s club owner and self-declared ‘biggest bastard in Yorkshire’. The improbable longevity of his anachronistic Rotherham working men’s club was the result of a pact Frankie had signed with the Devil 25 years previously – and in debut show Joe-Kent Waters is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!! the Devil came to collect, the show culminating in him being dragged to Hell, ‘by the balls’. Joe Kent-Waters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! (Good Fun Time) is the direct sequel: it begins in Hell, where Frankie is essentially practising almost exactly the same schtick to the souls of the damned as he was to the men of Rotherham (who I’m sure are two very different groups of people). The jokes are different, but it’s the same character doing the same shtick in a similar way – an audience member is picked on to a remarkable extent; a puppet dog is deployed. And it’s brilliant, the best show I’ve seen at the Fringe this year. Sometimes it’s death to return to what you did last time out, but it was exactly the right decision for Kent-Waters. Most crucially, the joke is still funny. Frankie – a sort of monstrous amalgam...

The screening of a classic Stephen Spielberg film on a univerity campus triggers an avalanche of mass redundancies and bizarre conspiracy theories in this fake news satire from Tim Foley, directed by Piers Black.

A new David Ireland play is quite the coup for Soho Theatre: the provocateur playwright’s last London show The Fifth Step played at the much bigger @sohoplace, with an all star cast. There is a catch, though it’s not necessarily a bad one: Most Favoured is only 45 minutes long, and will play in an early evening 6.30pm slot, so you’re done before most plays start.  It concerns Mary, a young woman who has been sleeping with strangers across Scotalnd for the last eight months, and Mike, the unworldly American tourist who constitutes her next conquest. But after sex, come revelations…  Lauren Lyle and Alexander Arnold star in the world premiere, which is directed by Max Elton.

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.