Stratford East

You’ll have a job getting into any of James Acaster’s bewildering multitude of London solo shows this March, although if you’re a fan of the subversive comedy superstar – and who isn’t – then by all means sign up for a waiting list, and it looks like his Hackney Empire shows (technically in April) aren’t entirely sold out at time of writing. These dates are, apparently, a basically finished new show, just it doesn’t have a name, with the only description the delightfully flip ‘a brand new show, full of everything you love about James Acaster and more!’. But you can also catch him at the head of a frankly sensational bill at a charity gig for The Bike Project earlier in the month at the Union Chapel. At time of writing it’s not sold out and as well as Acaster you get Sophie Duker, Janine Harouni, Catherine Bohart, Olga Koch and Jack Barry on the bill.

The ingredients to this 2012 play by Moonlight screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney feel familiar. Elite American high school, scholarship choir boys, one gay and bullied. A floppy-haired ‘think-outside-the-box’ teacher in the vein of The History Boys’ Hector or Dead Poets’ Society’s Keating.But in unfolding vignettes, arguments, sung spirituals and choral scenes – directed tenderly by Nancy Medina and Tatenda Shamiso in a production which ran in Bristol in 2023 – it becomes clear how McCraney is lulling us into familiar territory in order to then drift in his own direction.This is a story about how hard it is to be gay in high school, but main character Pharus is happily out and unashamed. The structures around him are trying to squeeze him back into the closet: ‘Tighten up’, is the headmaster’s gentle but dumb advice. ‘Keep them guessing – at least so they can’t ask’. Pharus has no desire to keep them guessing.Playing him, Terique Jarrett is so entertaining, with a loose physicality and a tendency to turn everything into a joke, partly a defence mechanism, but also just bursting with music and fun and refusing to let others make him feel unhappy. His adversary is Rabi Kondé’s Bobby, nephew of the headmaster, and envious of Pharus’s self-possession, whose homophobia causes the friction of the play.The other three could do with being more rounded; too often they’re backup singers rather than soloists, though they each get a moment to show themselves, especially Freddie...