Cabaret Voltaire

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 of Brian Potter and Papa Lazaru – remains a wonderful...