Morning Star columns
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Sketch Off Edinburgh Preview, Edinburgh Branch Theatre, London
Note: this review first appeared in the Morning Star newspaper… As July collapses into August, all the weirdos migrate north. Trains, planes, and automobiles filled with more clowns than seems possible – honk honk! – are en route to Edinburgh for the Fringe. Some of these clowns are tired already. Every year, working class performers Read more
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Review: Sketch-Off 2025 Final, Leicester Square Theatre
Despite the crisis in the arts, the UK has a never ending supply of fresh weirdos. Some come straight from their university improv clubs, and some are doing their recovery in public after a year of being brutalised at infamous French clowning school Gaulier. And some are here because their anarchic spirit allows them to Read more
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Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage + David Cronenberg’s Wife, The Crescent, York
This review first appeared in The Morning Star In a working men’s club turned community venue in Old York, indie kids young and old are out in force to see Jeffrey Lewis: New York’s finest, and possibly only, comic book artist, perma-touring troubadour, DIY garage-rock musician, and anti-folk songwriter. What is anti-folk? Tom, singer in Read more
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Review: Rice, Alvin Liu, The Glitch, Waterloo
Note: this review first appeared in the Morning Star Alvin Liu is from China, where even milquetoast liberals [1] are brutally censored. Still, a thriving standup scene has developed in the past few years in Shanghai and Beijing – though your entire venue might get shut down if someone makes a joke that could even Read more
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Review: Paul Merton and Suki Webster’s Improv Show, Comedy Store
Note – a shorter version of this review is in today’s Morning Star newspaper. The Comedy Store is showing its age. The logo is very eighties, as are much of its regular clientele. Most are here to see Paul Merton, him off the telly, who has been doing improv for longer than your correspondent can Read more
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Review: The Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career And Steal Your Future, by Hilke Schellmann
This review first appeared in the Morning Star A friend of mine once wrote a sketch about a management training guru, who claimed to have invented a tool that can tell “whether you’re a blue, a green, a red or… a dickhead.” Compared to the products and procedures documented in Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm: How Read more
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Review: Julia Masli, Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, Soho Theatre
This article first appeared in the Morning Star newspaper. Can clowns save the world? This probably wasn’t what Julia Masli, an Estonian performer trained by the notorious Parisian pedagogue Philippe Gaulier, had set out to achieve with her latest. Still, you never know. Masli always aims high, with seemingly limitless reserves of care, poise, and Read more
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Venn Diagram: Best Comedy of 2023
I told you the clowns were coming. Not necessarily red in nose and claw, but trained and brutalised by Phillippe Gaulier in Paris, broken down to their base components, then built back up again, full of vulnerability and wonder. Viggo Venn won Britain’s Got Talent with little more than an unexpected number of high vis Read more
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Best albums of 2023: Morning Star round-up
We are now in the era of Spotify Unwrapped. This is the zeitgeist of the streaming giant encouraging users to share which musicians they’ve not been giving their money to the most often over the past twelve months. Out there, away from the algorithms, it’s been a good year. The one overriding theme? Death, best Read more
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