Mark Thomas’s last show drew on his lifetime of political protest to address the government’s new police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, and it couldn’t have felt more necessary. His latest lacks that focus, or any particular cause – and suffers for it. Black and White is about “the simple act of being in a room together and toppling international capitalism”. In practice, that means gags and abuse directed at the Tories, an improvised “civic anthem” for Cambridge, and some affectionate jokes about the late Barry Cryer and Thomas’s no-filter mum.
The criticism usually levelled at Thomas’s work is that it’s more hectoring than comedy. That’s not often true, but it is in this first half, which finds the 59-year-old lashing out at Liz Truss, the need for “warm banks”, and the wider Tory shitshow. Nothing wrong with that. But if you’re aiming at such a soft target, you need better lines than “you fucking insane fuck” (of Thérèse Coffey) or “like the cookie monster went to Eton,” his well-worn epithet for our last-but-one PM.
There’s sharpness in his “anti-British” vaudeville routine, say, or the jaundiced gag about the Rwanda policy. But Thomas’s humour is too often a blunt instrument here. And there’s an ugly moment when he shouts down a woman in the crowd who dares speak up for Keir Starmer. How this narcissism-of-small-differences politics will help oust his hated Tories, who knows? But worse than that, it feels belligerent and curdles the atmosphere, however briefly, in the room.
It’s not the only time tonight that Thomas comes off too aggressive for his own good. See the section discussing Cambridge and its attractions, where he disdains Corpus Christi’s Grasshopper Clock (“how fucking poncy is that?”) and – in the feeble song he assembles from audience suggestions – calls for the burning down of the whole university. An anecdote about Barry Cryer’s funeral raises the tone, not least because it includes some choice Cryer gags – whose comic quality is far higher than the crude material about Thomas’s foul-mouthed mum that follows. Lacking a cause into which to direct his quarrelsome energy, Thomas dissipates it here on a show of only intermittent pleasures.
Mark Thomas: Black and White is on tour until 11 December.
