I first encountered the poet Luke Wright a decade ago, when I lived in Oxford and he was performing in a room above a pub. He had already published three collections and was a cult troubadour of Essex, where he grew up. Since then, he’s built up a following that sees a Monday afternoon show sold out. Luke Wright’s Silver Jubilee (Pleasance Dome, ★★★) celebrates the 41-year-old’s quarter of a century in the game – there are lots of riffs about his face on commemorative plates; a televised ceremony narrated by a Dimbleby.
It’s a show that does what Wright excels at: looking outward to explore class and contemporary culture. But his repeated use of the word “belonging” signals new, more personal territory, for it’s also a work about your place in the world. Wright might have grown up middle class in Essex, but he was born on a Hackney council estate in east London and adopted at five weeks old.
One poem is an ode to social workers, based around the “later life letter” his own one wrote him. Another is about discovering his birth mother on Facebook. It makes for affecting material – even the verse on his cats (Sir John Betjeman and Bagel) transforms the banal into bankable banter. Wright remains at his best, however, in state of the nation mode, all witty observation and rollicking acuity. His undoubted technical talent is on display in a univocalic poem – using just one vowel – about Westminster politics: “fat cats … stab at warm prawn snacks”; “Karl Marx sad”. As an aside, Wright’s show is the perfect companion piece to Grayson Perry’s Smash Hits exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy (another excavation of class from an Essex lad), a 10-minute walk away.
101 Psychos (Laughing Horse @ the Counting House, ★★) is the brainchild of Moni Zhang, founder of the Berlin Mental Health festival. Zhang has her own show (Child from Wuhan), but here she brings together, in a tiny room, a daily rotating roster of rookie comics who promise laughs on “the wonderfully twisted world of mental health”. There is no question that this is an area that can be mined for humour – I once had a psychiatrist drily ask me to please not kill myself because she couldn’t be arsed with the paperwork – but the vibe is very much work-in-progress. Various dud one-liners produce squirming in seats, although there’s some promise.
Zhang is an amusingly direct MC, even if her brand of audience engagement (essentially: snark) is somewhat wearisome. And a fearless dialogue around mental illness in a world of Instagrammable wellness trends is refreshing. The performers I saw: Andrew Tubman, racked with anxiety about the climate emergency; Barbara Fernandez, with a jaunty musical number on borderline personality disorder; Alex Bertulis-Fernandes (“hoarder is a really difficult label to let go of”); Mihai Tartara, who comes from Romania – “the land of opportunity, if you’re a vampire” – and Sofia May, whose charming stage presence suggests the most potential.
American comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu is a mainstay of Manhattan comedy clubs and off-Broadway productions. He’s earned positive notices from the New York Times and an Emmy nomination for best actor in a short form series for his Words With Ike. Amusements (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★★) is his perfectly titled UK debut and it surely won’t be long until he’s filling out much larger venues.
His set encompasses song (with a vocal that has a touch of Bing Crosby), mime, entirely silly puns and a plethora of accents, from mid-century US anchorman to landed gentry via Michael Caine-esque cockney. But also erudite wordplay – there’s an entire recitation of a good chunk of Shakespeare (“widely regarded as the Shakespeare of his day”). His shapeshifting is embodied sartorially in the garb of a tuxedo teamed with trainers. He subverts the usual comic act by asking if any of the audience require a volunteer, goes meta with analyses of the bits he’s just done and there’s a triumphant FAQs section, the focus of which has nothing to do with his act. Ufomadu tells his audience at one point: “I know there have been long stretches of your life when I have been entirely absent” – but on the evidence of this often endearingly nonsensical, arch and frequently whimsical (“any alumni of … school?”) performance, we’ll be seeing a lot more of him.
Across the courtyard we go to Rosie Holt, who shot to fame on Twitter during the pandemic, with her insightful spoofs of politicians (mostly, but not exclusively, Tory MPs). If some have been sniffy about her viral online route to fame – as though there were any other means in the bemasked days of washing down vegetables and shut theatres – they’ve been silenced with That’s Politainment! (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★★) in which Holt snakes up and down the auditorium with her mic cord, feeding off the audience in a variety of guises: Rosie Holt (a shires Conservative MP who believes every child should be able to ride a horse); the meta-scripted leftwing comic Rosie Holt; and a woke-obsessed populist chatshow host, Harriet Langley-Swindon (“stop ruining history by going on about the past”). In the first character, she has nailed the faux-concerned, strained smile that advertises a particular ideological cynicism.
Armando Iannucci has said that “everything since 2016 has been a wind up”, and that certainly feels true – Holt’s act on social media is so uncanny that plenty of people have mistaken her for the real thing. It’s a discombobulating experience, as Holt – a hugely likable figure – lurks just beneath her pinpoint portrayal of the awful personae manifesting our national psyche and never-ending chaotic meltdown. It could be argued – and the premise of this show is the embodiment of that argument – that the merging of entertainment and politics was the initial wrong turn (or rather, the resurgence of an old one, especially across the water). The revolving door was Commons to big corporate; now, it’s green benches to green room.
Aim is taken at the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Oliver Letwin and Lee Anderson. It’s OK if we don’t find her jokes funny, laissez-faire Tory MP Rosie Holt tells us, because she’s performing to some wealthier, higher-class audiences afterwards, “and the laughs should trickle down.”
In Bristo Square, the fringe play with undoubtedly the best soundtrack – we’re talking David Bowie, Tina Turner, Beach House – Glass Ceiling Beneath the Stars (Pleasance Dome, ★★★★) is a triumph of a four-hander from Bric à Brac and Grace Dickson Productions. In 2016, the film Hidden Figures told of a group of black female mathematicians at Nasa, battling the sexism and racism of both the institution and, well, planet Earth.
Glass Ceiling Beneath the Stars explores similar territory in an hour of motivational, educational, technically innovative and superlative storytelling. Focusing on Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to go to space, and (the white) Jan Davis (leered at by a press obsessed with whether or not she had sex with her fellow-astronaut husband on the mission), the drama guides us from the adolescence of Jemison and Davis, to 1992, the year of the STS-47 space shuttle launch, and beyond. We travel through the decades, nonchronologically, by way of music, costume change (shift dress, jumpsuits) and screen-projected archive footage of cultural events, and watch as the two women overcome the separate but related prejudicial obstacles in their way.
The standout, but never gimmicky, dramatic apparatus is a multimedia bonanza: the use of two handheld cameras, operated by the (all-female) cast to livestream closeups of themselves, projected on to a large screen (surtitles included). It smartly parallels not just the science of the show’s subject, but conjures the atmosphere of contemporaneous audiences watching new frontiers on flickering box sets. It’s not a sermonising play, but spirited, depicting weightlessness in slow-mo choreography with the actors holding their ponytails upside down. The cast members are faultless in their hybrid roles and the whole thing is, aptly, a perfect example of the risk of new and exploratory ideas paying off. It will also send audience members to Wikipedia in the manner of Oppenheimer fans.
Finally, Skin Pigeon (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★★★) is quite simply the most fun a person can have in a room featuring folding chairs (unless they’re the torturer in a gritty ITV drama or really love Ikea). A fringe newcomer, the award-winning Lorna Rose Treen has devised a bonkers, brilliant array of characters, by turns keenly observed and utterly absurd. There’s the nine-year-old Brownie with a star-gazing badge (“I stalked Hugh Grant for weeks”); the netball-wielding PE teacher (the strongest use of the word “pivot” since that Friends episode); the ghost who admits their dating-profile picture was taken “a really long time ago”; and the smoking seductress in the pillbox hat, red lipstick and floor-length furs, with a lisp.
There’s also a cowboy born with guns for hands, in a sort of Edward Scissorhands meets reverse King Midas (he keeps accidentally shooting everyone he loves), and references to Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator speech and a much-mocked Love Actually scene. Treen’s world would easily translate to television but she has the kind of presence (there were people weeping on the front row), and a contagious, radiating hilarity – like a sneeze sets off a sneeze sets off a sneeze – that can only be fully appreciated in the flesh (or, in this case, the skin). Go. Stalk her for weeks.
