When you’re wading through a Margaret Sessa-Hawkins review you feel a great sense of sympathy for Britain’s schoolteachers. These people have to go home and do a load of marking, and to do that marking they need to read a lot of tripe that has been written by children. And children, for the most part, […]
I’ll be honest with you, Elspeth Rudd got my back up right from the off. “ELSPETH RUDD is currently an undergraduate studying English at Bangor University,” quoth her bio. “This will be her first Edinburgh Festival and she isn’t entirely sure what she is letting herself in for!” Well hey, Elspeth, it’s only people’s lives […]
At one end of the reviewing spectrum is the callow youth determined to slay a comedy giant with their caustic dismissals; at the other is the starstruck devotee. Obank is clearly of the second water, and spends her first paragraph rattling off the accolades of whoever she’s looking at. Having done so, it seems unlikely […]
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 […]
Sam Waddicor needs to clean up his grammar and his spelling if he’s going to write for Broadway Baby – goodness knows they’re not going to do it for him. Some passages of his reviews just leave you scratching your head. “His most successful moments were probably his impressions of various tapes” he says of […]
In 2012 Nicole Adam committed the egregious reviewing sin of misunderstanding a show and then reviewing her own misunderstanding. She went to see The Room, a screening of the Tommy Wiseau film that is “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” where the audience shout and throw things at the screen, Rocky-Horror style, and enjoy how […]
My esteemed editor Mister Kipper made the point, in his editorial to this site, that sometimes the holy land of comedy is just a sort of Amsterdam to reviewers. They arrive, they empty their angry balls and then they jet off back to their theatre and their cabaret and their wives and their children’s shows […]
Joe Abel is a difficult reviewer to quantify. This is because some of his reviews are written by a man with English as a first language and some of them, I am prepared to swear, are translated via the internet from the original Mongolian. Just look at this overboiled word soup that is his review […]