FESTIVAL COMEDY | Previews
TOP 5: FREE SHOWS
Here’s a quintet where you just throw cash into a bucket at the end Wonder & Joy ‘An interactive atheist service singalong meets comedy pep rally experience’ is how Sanderson Jones describes his venture with Pippa Evans (both pictured above). From the ashes of this show, three Sunday Assembly dates will rise as their comedy congregation swells. Heroes @ The Hive, 226 0000, 4–24 Aug (not 14, 21), 7.30pm. Previews 1–3 Aug.
Sean McLoughlin Having outgagged Iain Stirling in a 2011 double-header, the intriguing McLoughlin does a solo hour that reflects on his Backbone. Or possibly lack thereof. Laughing Horse @ Espionage, 477 7007, 3–25 Aug (not 13), 6.15pm. Previews 1 & 2 Aug.
Nat Luurtsema One-third of sketch team Jigsaw, this self-dubbed ‘tea-sodden clown’ gives us Here She Be, a show apparently about bits of her personal life that she insists she is rubbish at. Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 667 7533, 2–26 Aug, 2.45pm. Joke Thieves Last year, Will Mars won bronze in Dave’s Joke of the Fringe tournament. He’s celebrated by launching a brand new comedy night, which has comics swapping each other’s sets. Among the names confirmed to be taking part so far are Milo McCabe, Jessica Fostekew, Will Franken and Stephen Carlin. Laughing Horse @ Espionage, 477 7007, 1–25 Aug (not 13), 10pm.
John-Luke Roberts Formerly one half of the excellent Behemoth sketch duo, JLR had the critics drooling with his 2010 Fringe hit John-Luke Roberts Distracts You From a Murder. This year, he delivers some Broken Stand-Up. Clever chap. Voodoo Rooms, 226 0000, 3–25 Aug (not 13), 4.15pm. (Brian Donaldson)
52 THE LIST FESTIVAL 1–8 Aug 2013
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PAUL PIRIE When funny bones meets focus
A mainstay of Scottish stand-up who decamped to Essex, Paul Pirie has always possessed a maverick streak. Expelled for constantly clowning around in school, the Dundonian dedicated his job at Primark to cheering up depressed colleagues and customers. A ‘resting’ actor, he once ran a pub quiz where the top prize was his flat keys. When he began performing comedy in 2004, though, his thespian training proved invaluable, affording him the ‘stage presence and projection’ to complement what’s ‘quite a physical face’.
Five years on from his solo Edinburgh debut, Pirie’s show has become more universal, after he
‘slowed down and eradicated everything parochial from my act, like bits about Gaelic TV and even Dundee’. In truth, he found adapting to the London circuit easier than most. Returning north is now an enjoyable ‘opportunity to let my hair down and get into the old Scottish mindset. There’s a social element of friends and family being here too.’ Still ‘manic’ these days, but now a leaner, hungrier comic with a parallel sketch-writing career and
desire for more broadcast work, he long ago banished some sniping that he was coasting along on naturally funny bones and booze. Appearing as part of the Free Festival, he suggests you ‘put a sandwich in my bucket every day: that would rock!’ After rejecting the title Gags to Riches (‘I don’t really do gags and I’m not rich’), he’s suddenly
worried that naming his hour after its principal subject matter (Me) ‘does sound very egotistical now that you mention it. I genuinely feel that the better the title, the shitter the show, because you’ve spent too long on the former and not enough on the latter. I should have gone for Fuck the Title! My Show’s Awesome!’ (Jay Richardson) ■ Laughing Horse @ The White Horse, 557 3512, 1–25 Aug, 9.45pm, free.
ERIC AND LITTLE ERN Showbiz legends remembered
The legacy of those incontrovertible behemoths of British comedy, Morecambe and Wise, lives on with this new play. Written, devised and performed by Ian Ashpitel and Jonty Stephens, it looks back on 41 years of a working friendship from Wise’s final days at the Nuffield Hospital before his death in 1999. Aiming to bring to life the ‘feel, look and sound’ of an evening with Eric and Ernie, the show combines much-loved sketches in revue with additional original material by Eddie Braben, Sid Green and Dick Hills. It also takes a peek behind the curtain at their (not always so cheerful) lives offstage, a tactic that earned success for Bob Golding’s one-man performance Morecambe at the 2009 Fringe.
Ashpitel and Stephens reckon their own decades- long friendship helps them recreate the chemistry of that incomparable duo, though they suggest it helps that Ashpitel ‘just happens to have short, fat, hairy legs’. (Suzanne Black) ■ Gilded Balloon Teviot, 622 6552, 3–26 Aug (not 7, 14), 3.15pm, £11.50–£12.50 (£10.50–£11.50). Previews 31 Jul−2 Aug, £6.50.