Outer limits of laughter
0 Alfie Brown is a great wordsmith and satirist
die for his son and who still loves his ex so obviously and so much. The one who skewers himself for talking to his newly verbal son on the
phone while in a cab to a lapdancing club. The one who is a brilliantly excoriating political comic and a great wordsmith and a delight- ful satirist. Even the one who talks so straightforwardly about suicide.
This show is extraordinarily wide-ranging – Uber drivers, breast-milk, oysters, what words are acceptable to teach your kids and even some enthusiastic singing – but this is not a comic trying to pad out his show, rather it is a comic with nonlinear thinking patterns and a wealth of opinion and passion and funny. This hour is a breathtaking, mindshaking, thoughtprovoking, eyewatering blast. By the end of it, I really do not think there is anyone in the room who has issues with Alfie’s likeability, although, to be fair, his crowd-work could do with a bit of honing. It is pants. But it is not, thank goodness, his “thing”. It is tricky to write 350 sensible words when you come out a show simply thinking “Wow! F**k! Wow!” but I have done my best.
KATE COPSTICK
Until 26 August. Today 9:30pm.
Russian misinformation is one of the recurring news stories of our time, so it’s intriguing to hear Olga Koch suggest how deeply falsehoods are entrenched in her nation’s psyche. Comedy is good for her because she’s a huge liar too, the American-educated, Uk-based émigré maintains.
She is the daughter of Russia’s exiled former deputy prime minister Alfred Koch, a Putin critic so implicated in the carve up of state assets during Glasnost that he became a gameshow host.
In 2014, he was stopped by border control from boarding a flight from Moscow to Munich, thus setting in motion a train of events that has seen the Kremlin try to excise the Koch name from history. The comic capably conveys what it felt like to be growing up during the Soviet Union’s break-up, with family snapshots and staggering footage of a Pizza Hut advert showing Russia’s embrace of capitalism, her own mixed feelings about this “Wild West” time suggested by her retro-kitsch shellsuit.
But while Koch sets the record straight and delivers a warning from history, an hour can’t contain both the complexity of the politics and the personal, making for a patchy show that fitfully amuses but doesn’t fulfil its promise.
JAY RICHARDSON
Until 26 August. Today 7:15pm.