The thing about Bruce Blacklaw is that he writes a bit like Steve Bennett from Chortle. He even looks a bit like Steve Bennett from Chortle. And the way he keeps making little quips that sometimes work and sometimes just tip over into mean-spiritedness, that’s so Steve. The way the frustration leaks out that he’s […]
First, a confession: I do not always know what Maud Sampson is talking about. “Think less 50 Cent and his hoes, more Tupac in his 1995 police custody video talking about rap as poetry,” she advises as a way to understand Rubberbandits. Tupac? He was one of those rapper chaps, wasn’t he? Forgive me, I […]
This year, Beswick had me at Hello when his review of Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel opened with: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a successful show in possession of good reviews, must be in want of a bit of an upgrade.” And I quite like how he tries to keep the tone […]
The thing I like about Lizzie Milton’s reviews is that she doesn’t try to write like a reviewer, or rather, like what the average Three Weeks critic THINKS a reviewer might write like. Milton writes the way your friend might talk when coming out of a show. Well, depending on what your friends are like. […]
Malcolm Jack isn’t impressed by much, and he wants us to know it. His adjectives all flow from the seen-it-all, done-it-all, yadda-yadda school of journalism. Of Gemma Whelan’s Chastity Butterworth & The Spanish Hamster he writes that something like this turns up at the Fringe “pretty much every year in one form or another”. Gareth […]
Is there a name more deliciously Joyceian than Maeve Scullion? I can imagine Maeve Scullion being one of the ladies Leopold Bloom eyes up from behind his bushes in Ulysses. You’d expect no nonsense from Maeve Scullion. No nonsense, and maybe some soup. I imagine her going down ‘the comedy’ with a big ladle, just […]
Oh, Agnes Chambre. Agnes Charm-breh. AGNES… Chambre. Did any name evermore deliciously combine the apparent and the other? The matriarch and the madame? The kitchen and the bedroom? The no-nonsense and the funny business? If I could be reincarnated, as a woman, I would definitely call myself Agnes Chambre. Or even Agnes Chamber. A chamber […]
Tom Bateman’s reviews have a measured, precise quality pitched somewhere between politician and cricket commentator. But if his praise is always qualified his criticisms are even more so. He muses over one show he did not “fully connect with”, saying that it “may be that the show lacks ambition”. He isn’t sure. He’s wondering. Some […]