Stories that stay with you
thespace @ Symposium Hall (Venue 43) JJ
Her theme is what distinguishes good luck from bad and the way life can turn on an instant.
She sometimes plays little tricks with truth and falsehood but her stories are fundamentally true to life, reflective, wise and sometimes a little bit messy.
Kendall was a stand-up before she forged her storytelling style and has the ability to make an audience laugh at will.
Her loving but perpetually fraught mother is a source of endless fun and she also introduces her rebellious grandmother and talks about her little son.
It is a family divided by geography but united by shared experience.
Kendall’s narrative is fluent, simply told and astonishingly beautiful in places. Like life her tone can turn in an instant, taking you from sadness to joy in a moment.
She’ll make you laugh, she’ll make you think. And as you leave the theatre and walk out under the stars Kendall’s stories will still be running around in your head. CLAIRE SMITH
0 Kendall’s narrative spans hemispheres while she was still in Russia and her homosexuality when she moved to the US, though she partied freely at her Sunset Boulevard mansion, dubbed the Garden of Alla, and ferociously “scrapped my way through the boy’s club”.
Grainy photographs and footage of Nazimova and her world flicker behind Nordlinger, like hazy black and white memories of a character who lived her life in saturated technicolour. FIONA SHEPHERD music fan and latterly singleton, revelling in the idiosyncratic behaviour he can indulge in now he’s alone.
Almost gentlemanly in his viewing of porn, Ward has thought long and hard about sex, from his favourite sample of Prince’s moans to the age he’ll be before he truly masters intercourse, his likening of impending orgasm to galloping horses evocatively presented.
Alluding to his ex, Jane, the one who got away, he also memorably depicts a serial killer neighbour and takes phone calls from his sister, who initiated him into the world once he left hardcore Christianity.
His troubled relationship with his mother meanwhile, forms the bedrock of his hour, Ward’s efforts to reconnect with her going further than anticipated.
Initially slow, with mixed success for his initial crowd work, he nevertheless artfully draws you into his story without being explicit, drip-feeding you just enough information to keep you invested. JAY RICHARDSON When we last met Paul Sinha on the Fringe, he was a very happy chappie. He was a regular on ITV quiz The Chase and, in his mid-forties, was in his first gay relationship, with someone younger than him, better looking than him – he said it, we aren’t given the visual evidence – and a trainee solicitor. This last point was like all his parents’ Christmases coming together. Well, he’s still on The Chase… After spending three weeks telling 2015 audiences how well everything was going, he returned home only to be dumped under pretty unusual circumstances.
And things didn’t get any better, as the one-time locum doctor was beset by several days that were, at best, rubbish.
Which, in the hands of Sinha, makes for comedy gold. A confident, engaging performer, he’s relaxed enough to go a little off-route without losing control of his narrative, whose constituent parts include, but aren’t limited to, the day adolescence kicked in, his autistic nephew, neck heckles and looking for love among quiz geeks.
So has he found a new man in the last couple of years? I shan’t spoil that one, let’s just hope Sinha gets past this month without incident.
Though if he doesn’t, that’s his next show sorted. MARTIN GRAY Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) JJ Do you know how it feels to be a 34-year-old woman who desperately wants a child? No? Nor do I. Jenny Bede has created a one-woman musical comedy about wanting a baby with no notion that people in her audience might have a different experience of life.
An actress pretending to be a comic, she does impressions of her friends, screeches unfunny observations about her sex life into a microphone and, most unpleasantly of all, bursts into song. With the volume in this tiny room turned up to the max, you feel like your ears are bleeding. CLAIRE SMITH