Tim Harding's comedy diary

Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the best comedy he's been watching in London this past fortnight... 

For some of us, the occasional return of clown king Dr Brown to the Soho Theatre is an occasion for self-reflection. His 2015 show Ceremony, a collaboration with Sam Simmons, was my entry point into an appreciation of modern clowning, but I was a few years late: everyone else had already had their heads blown off by Befrdfrgth in 2012, the show that sent a thousand weird theatre kids to find themselves in Ecole Philippe Gaulier.

I didn’t catch up with Befrdfrgth until he restaged it for a one-off performance at the Bill Murray in 2022, and to my dismay it was already getting a little hard to see what had been so special about it. Now that’s not a knock on Dr Brown or his legion of – often incredibly talented – descendants; if anything it’s a rap on the knuckles for me for seeing too much comedy and essentially diluting this experience I love so much.

But I wonder if others will have a similar experience to me at his new show Beturns, his first in almost ten years. His patented style remains as strong as ever, but you can’t call it distinctive in the same way it used to be, and I was struck most of all by how little the act has evolved in the last 12 years.

Of course, the things that make Dr Brown fundamentally special ain’t broke. He’s an incredibly charismatic and expressive mime, and the games of status and misleading instruction that he plays with his audience members, while not new, are an exquisite example of the type. 

Much of his work is based on the mutability of human body language: he loves to draw his chosen collaborator towards a particular response while keeping his communication just ambiguous enough that he can always wrongfoot them. 

Beturns is gentler than his other shows, and was performed largely with the help of a single audience member, who accompanied him through a tender cycle of life, age and death. I felt like its thematic content was a little beside the point until the final moment, when profundity hit me like a ton of bricks.

Considerably less profound was Luke Kempner, doing a reprise of last year’s show, promising to combine the titular Gritty Police Drama with comedy, musical numbers, and 60 impressions in 60 minutes. It takes an very talented guy to pull this off, and Kempner deserves all his applause, even if the material is technically speaking a little thin. 

The issue is, he’s weighted the show too heavily towards the impressions – if you’re doing one every minute PLUS all the exposition, singing etc, it lashes you to some very broad material. For example, if King Charles only has a 20 second slot, you kind of have to jam the fat fingers joke in there just so that everyone knows it’s him, even if it would seem hack in another context. So he uses the speed to skate over gaps in the content, but it’s still a great night out while it lasts.

Andrew Doherty, formerly of sketch duo Megan From HR, is taking a time honoured narrative sketch pilgrimage to a mysterious island in his solo debut Gay Witch Sex Cult, playing a daft twinky estate agent who gets entangled with the titular cult while trying to marry his boyfriend. 

Doherty is a funny performer backed up by some great, genuinely scary sound design, and the fusion of camp comedy with horror and narrative sketch feels fresh, even if the actual mystery plot is pretty half baked and doesn’t really lead to a satisfying narrative or thematic conclusion. I’m not sure if he’s continuing to work on the show before he takes it to the Fringe but I think he’s about halfway there to a real smash hit.

Finally, Marie Faustin has returned to London for a week with her new show Sorry I’m Late. I know on a global level that American stand-up is the dominant form, so you can’t really call it a sub-genre, but compared to the variety of an average week of comedy at the Soho Theatre, it feels like American stand-ups are clustered in a very narrow stylistic field. 

All of which is to say that Faustin is another absolute charisma bomb from New York, projecting a totally alien level of confidence and slickness onto material that often veers into the pedestrian. 

As an audience member, you’re not buying a ticket to see material about Uber drivers, flying first class or running late, you’re doing it to spend time in the company of a megawatt star, with all the dazzling superficiality that entails. 

Having said that, I really enjoyed it – she has an unapologetic vivacity and rapaciousness to her stage presence that would be unimaginable on the British circuit, and she created an instant party atmosphere in the theatre, even if I suspect we weren’t hooting and hollering as much as she’s used to.

Published: 3 May 2024