Pleasance Dome

A comedy veteran of well over quarter a century at the tender age of 43 (she did her first gig aged 14), everyone’s favourite lefty optimist Josie Long returns with the follow up to 2023’s well-received Re-Enchantment, which detailed her experiences with parenthood, Covid and moving out of London. We’re told Now is the Time of Monsters is a show about extinct megafauna, which is probably not the entire truth – the title comes from a Gramsci quote – but is almost certainly some of the truth (her kids have apparently been learning about the beasts of the Cenozoic era). 

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...

This review is from London, October 2024. Arcade will play at thet 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, along with Darkfield’s Eulogy and Darkfield Radio. Blackout theatre specialists Darkfield – aka Glen Neath and David Rosenberg – have spent years crafting meticulously disorientating immersive worlds that audience members experience via sophisticated headphones-based binaural sound design, performed in entirely lightless shipping containers. On the whole, they feel like surreal, sinister dreams: evocative but you’re effectively a passenger – just along for the ride, with no real agency of your own, and as the (very short) shows wear on and you get acclimatised to the darkness I’ve generally found the whole thing starts to feel a bit sillier. Arcade is a clever and unsettling leap forwards, giving you a degree of agency as you’re stood at an old school arcade machine with a big button on it that you press to indicate ‘yes’ in the choose-your-own-adventure style story. You do not in fact play an arcade game, but the general understanding in the interactive story relayed through your headphones is that you’re an avatar named Milk in a game that you could either interpret as intended to be imagined as sophisticated VR or taken literally as a headphones game from Darkfield. Whatever the case, you’re thrust into a violent, absurdist dystopia and while one button might not sound like a lot of agency, when I got shot point blank in the head within about 30 seconds of starting after making an...

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 probably a bit more to it than that. 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 students she encounters are initially baffled by her, and she them: different accents, different approaches to money, very different ideas in what ‘going out’ involves (she dresses up, they dress down). What’s great...