Soho Theatre

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I promise I won’t go on about this too much, but I think I may have been responsible for The Sun’s bizarre 2023 attack on Lorna Rose Treen, in which the tabloid accused the rising sketch star of killing comedy with ‘wokery’. I was on the panel for the Dave Joke of the Fringe award that year, and I nominated Treen’s harmless – and by no stretch of the imagination woke – gag that won that year’s award (it revolved around ‘cheetah’ and ‘cheater’ being homophones). So unless another panellist also nominated it then that was me - sorry Lorna! This isn’t simply a flex because Treen has a new show, but because within a few minutes of it starting she very amusingly breaks with its Americana theme to address the Sun ‘incident’ – she has the article printed out to show us – and to declare that her intent this time is to kill theatre as well. 24 Hour Diner People isn’t really a theatre show, but it’s certainly notably higher concept than its predecessor Skin Pigeon. It follows a series of oddball characters at a quintessentially American diner – possibly at some point in the ‘80s – with Treen playing most roles and audience members being dragooned in to tackle the rest.  It is a huge amount of fun, in large part for the same reason Skin Pigeon was: Treen tackles the bizarre series of characters – from our daydreaming waitress host to a trucker with really long arms to a bizarrely kinky schoolgirl – with total conviction, and a...

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...

The alt. comedy superstar tries out some new work for an hour, in a variety of venues across London. The shows are largely but not yet entirely sold out, and well worth snagging the last few places.

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Ultra-nerdy standup Kieran Hodgson – a man who once did an entire hour about the 1975 European referendum – recently had a cameo role in notorious superhero flop The Flash. In fact he spoke the first line in the movie. This is so prodigiously improbable that it’s no wonder it’s the jumping off point for his new show, Voice of America.  In fact the very English Hodgson makes relatively little hay out of his turn as the character dubbed Sandwich Guy, the drawling American barista who opens the doomed Ezra Miller flicks. Of course he talks about it a lot, and is as bemused as anyone that it happened. But there’s no behind-the-scenes goss or analysis of the film itself. Rather, some initial feedback over the quality of his accent is used as a jumping off point to explore his relationship with America as a whole. To a certain extent the point of Hodgson’s unswervingly high concept stand-up shows is that they’re not especially relatable: he’s an intensely warm and likeable performer, but he pursues odd obsessions, in an eccentric manner. His last, Made in Scotland, followed his relocation to Glasgow and his attempt to immerse himself in Scottish culture and language to such a ludicrous degree that it seemed calculated to wind up anyone Scottish in the audience (which is quite a lot of people at the Edinburgh Fringe). Voice of America, though, is very relatable: it’s about the complicated relationship we all have with the...

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I very much enjoyed this berserk late-night hour from Alice Cockayne, a selection of inscrutable but hilarious character sketches that might offer a sort of anxiety dream interrogation of contemporary femininity, or might just be a load of random shit that exists purely for the lolz. If that sounds hifalutin it’s definitely not: Cockayne has a colossal pair of fake boobs strapped to her for the entire show, starting with the lengthy opening scene in which she plays the deadpan owner of what one assumes to be a brothel, although all her working ‘girls’ – represented by wigs that are sometimes thrust at audience members – seem to be very old and have a lot of problems (‘riddled with neurodiversity’). Other characters include the posh, wildly overbearing Penelope Jane Pendlewitch, whose entire worth is tied up in motherhood and who claims to have had ‘556 children’; a cleaner, also apparently incredibly old, who fills the air with cleaning spray and dirty thoughts; and an Eastern European woman with incredibly long nails.  To be honest, describing the characters doesn’t make them make sense and Licensed. Professional. Trained. Qualified. is one of those balls-trippingly weird shows that would conceivably not work if it were staged for an afternoon crowd (it is currently running in the 10.40pm slot). But while the WTF absurdity is a lot of the point, it’s Cockayne’s eye for layering her oddball creations with details that...

The old adage ‘everything good comes to London anyway’ (is this an adage? it should be) once again holds true as the winner of the main Best Show comedy award at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe transfers to Soho Theatre in very short order. Trans comic Sam Nicoresti had sort of hovered on the fringes of the Fringe in previous years with shows too weird or not quite finished enough to click with a wider audience. But the pointedly more mainstream Baby Doomer did the trick perfectly, an eccentric but accessible meditation on the trans experience, groaning with actual jokes.

A hit at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Hannah Khalil’s one-woman show is a based on the true story of Atoosa Sepehr, who fled her abusive husband in Iran to start a new life in the UK. It’s performed by Isabella Nefar, who cooks an ash-e-reshteh (Persian noodle soup) live during the show.