I can’t remember… is Sophie Cartman the underprivileged London one or the feral Scottish winner of the Steve Bennett Lower Class Munificence Outreach Award? At any rate she is producing reviews for Chortle at the rate of one a week, so we’re tempted to tell Steve he’s on a losing wicket here. YOU JUST CAN’T […]
Helen Ackrill has a strong sense of what’s fair, and never criticises anything without first giving a thorough explanation. And when she praises something she tends to do it from the side, above, below and close up. Helen Ackrill tends to say the same thing over and over again. I’m not going to be a […]
Ben Shannon is a likeable presence whose relaxed hand on the tiller eases the audience into the situation, combining a light-hearted patter and confidence beyond his years. Don’t take my word for it, though. Because those were not my words. They were a reviewer’s words, back when Shannon was in Three Men and a Saucepan […]
Graeme Connelly doesn’t really know what sentences are supposed to do. Every time he begins one he has no idea where it will end, or what he wants it to achieve. Most of the time he ends it prematurely, as if suddenly aborting its mission. Sometimes four or five sentences are sent out in succession, […]
Fringe veterans – particularly antipodeans – probably remember Barrie Morgan – he was the hero of Barrie Morgan’s World of Organs, the Australian sitcom and Fringe show. True, we have no evidence that it’s the same Barrie Morgan. In fact we desperately hope it isn’t. Just imagine being in something that creatively bonkers and then […]
Marissa Burgess rarely allows herself more than 200 words, and even then never gets very close to the thing she’s examining. This can lead to her doing that reviewer’s thing of just reeling off the set-list, as she does with Paul F Taylor: “…Greedy seagulls, cats who are like baked products and impressions of caterpillars […]
Nobody can doubt Chamberlain’s devotion to comedy; her long service in some fairly tough jobs is testament to that. Neither has she ever flinched from her ideal of what comedy should be. Despite some people complaining (and with some justification, perhaps) that you can’t book acts and review them, Chamberlain is held in good affection […]
Jay Richardson writes for everyone who matters at the Fringe, and others that don’t particularly. The two things that define him are his constant recourse to reason and his deft turn of phrase. He employs a great economy with words, so that three paragraphs give as accurate a picture of a performance as four or […]
If you’re going to give someone a two-star review, Hilary, have some mercy: do it quick and do it clean. A 500-word dissertation on everything that happened in a show, along with what was wrong with it, seasoned with innumerable little jokes of your own, is inexcusable. It’s the reviewing equivalent of the axeman who […]
Corry Shaw is a strange person. I hope I’m not stretching my brief here; I am aware I need to assess the reviewer, not their personality. But Corry Shaw is a perplexingly odd character and this oddity explains the nature of her reviews. At the 2013 Fringe she reviewed one thing, The Barnes Identity, which […]
In 2008 Meakin reviewed Rob Deb’s The Dork Knight Returns, giving it one star. In 2009 she reviewed Rob Deb’s Army of Dorkness 2, complaining that it was just as hateful as the show she’d seen the previous year and giving it another one-star review. She didn’t review very much else that year. She doesn’t […]