Nanna Gunnars doesn’t want to be misunderstood. Perish the thought. Her reviews have a fussy preciousness to them that’s as clumsy as it is amusing. Her description of Lost Voice Guy was both informative and reasonable, for example, concluding “His banter with the audience is one of the best I have witnessed, not just on […]
“I went into the theatre thinking that assisted suicide was a sad but sometimes necessary thing, and I left thinking just that, having learnt very little”. Thus Tom Moyser admonishes Chris Larner, explaining that he had to remove a star from the true monodrama of his terminally ill wife, because he didn’t learn that lethal […]
Hawkins is a great fan of the words ‘hackneyed’, ‘indulgent’, ‘boring’ and the phrases ‘goes on too long’ and ‘this is hardly new’. Do people not realise that he has somewhere important to be, like another show he can’t be arsed to sit through? His prose is noisy with the sound of eyeballs being rolled […]
I’m not sure I believe anything that Rory Mackenzie writes. Not because I think he’s lying, but because I’m not convinced he knows what he’s looking at. His reviews seem to be rooted in the soil of deep ignorance, fertilised by sublimated pain and anxiety. Reading one of his reviews is like trying to get […]
Victoria Beardwood is very good. In fact, so good is she that I scoured every single one of her reviews looking for something to moan about and I pretty much came up empty. They’re concise, enthusiastic, witty without being condescending, and they fit perfectly into the Three Weeks slug format. If there’s one little quibble […]
Well, thank fuck that Lottie Ormerod took time out from her busy schedule of reviewing things like Princess Pumpalot: The Farting Princess to go and see one comedy show in 2014. Please don’t think, however, that Ormerod is unschooled in the ways of comedy: on the contrary she knows exactly what it’s like to be […]
You only have to look at Kanza Marland’s photograph, staring at the reader from somewhere between contempt and constipation, to guess what this reviewer is all about. Once you see it backed up by Lauren Cooper-esque headlines like ‘Unbothered’ and ‘Hardly Over-Powelling’ (for Russ Powell you see), you realise that Marland has all the hallmarks […]
Adam Harwood won’t use three words where six will do. For instance, he could have said: “Joe Fairbrother has a strong lunchtime show that involves his audience while keeping them relaxed”. Instead, he says “If a good, strong, lunchtime comedian is one who can involve many audience members in his show while keeping them feeling […]
One of my personal bugbears is the reviewing practice that, in the process of appraising a thing, slates something else that’s entirely unrelated. “This thing is even worse than that thing”. Reviewing Alexei Sayle, Kai Sedgwick says: “With the passage of time, a rose-spectacled audience has a tendency to romanticise the past. That’s why bands […]
Kathleen Sergeant is by no means a bad writer, in fact she’s probably one of the better ones at this particular publication. Everything she writes is cogent and considered. It’s just that it’s a bit boring. Sargeant has a way of describing things she has thoroughly enjoyed in such a way that they seem the […]
Andrew Bell has an irritating habit of talking about things we have no idea about without bothering to expand on them. “the gloriously un-PC American God is the stand out moment” he says of Guilt and Shame, leaving it entirely at that. “The mind reading phone gimmick doesn’t really work”, he adds, later. Either explain […]
It is difficult to sum up in mere words quite what a disgrace Andrea Valentino is to the already besmirched art of reviewing, nor what divine relief his being eaten by an ebola-like virus would be to all future Fringes. Normally we are content when a bad reviewer just stops reviewing; in Valentino’s case we […]
Jessie Maltin’s reviews look odd on the page. It’s not her fault: Broadway Baby’s brand new layout puts the first paragraph of each review in a massive font size, with the subsequent ones much smaller, and – unlike her Hollywood film-reviewing namesake, Maltin tends to only write two paragraphs. Sometimes, though, less is more and […]
Reviewers who review just one comedy thing and then scarper back to the high-art trenches of theatre / spoken word / cabaret / exhibition / anal flute-playing are a particular bête noir of our editor, Mister Kipper, who practically insists that we deduct a swine point from them just for being a fly-by-night chancer. (No […]
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 […]
Chris Tapley wrote five comedy reviews for The Skinny in 2013, all of them well-constructed, well-argued and grammatically tight. You have to wonder if The Skinny can’t squeeze a bit more comedy juice out of its more talented reviewers. Tapley isn’t one of those jack of all trades who is constantly being distracted by theatre […]