The striking cover for the Brighton Festival 2019 programme shouts out loud who this year’s Guest Director is. Silhouetted in flowers, in stunning artwork by Simon Prades, is the unmistakeable profile of Malian musician Rokia Traoré. Taking place between 4th and 26th May at a host of south coast venues, this year’s Festival, which launched its schedule of events this morning, looks to be a multi-faceted extravaganza with true international reach. Once again, theartsdesk is proud to be a media partner.“I set out to bring new voices to the city to tell their stories,” Traoré explained, “ Read more ...

The first line of this show is “I'm the guy who you meet right after you come out of a long-term relationship.” On the night I see The Guy Who..., Adam Riches has three tries with it before he meets his target, a woman who has been dumped by a long-standing boyfriend.His character, whose name we never learn, is reading the Sunday papers – “the physical edition!” – with reading glasses placed artistically in his mouth as he ponders what he has just read, while we take our seats in this funky bar in King's Cross. He's super woke, super cool and super suave. But he's also super dangerous.He Read more ...

Lost Voice Guy – aka Lee Ridley – won Britain’s Got Talent last year. He's a unique talent in that his cerebral palsy means he is unable to speak, and so he delivers his comedy through a synthesizer controlled via his iPad.If you saw him on BGT, you will know Ridley uses his disability to the full in his comedy; he mocks himself and others, telling a story about the game of top trumps he played with a deaf and blind man on the train as to who deserved the disabled space more – daring to top that with a joke about the blind's man's guide dog. His gag about able-bodied people being impatient if Read more ...

Daniel Sloss's latest show is called X, to denote his 10th show. The Scottish comic started in comedy as a teenager in 2009 when a lot of his material was knob and wank gags, but in recent years his work has had a progressively edgier feel, including shows that delved into his sister's death from cerebral palsy and the childhood grooming from which he had a lucky escape.At the top of the show, Sloss tells us he's going to make us feel uncomfortable, but in truth at the start X feels more like a comfortable settling-in, with some of the puerile jokes that long-time fans such as myself would Read more ...

There's a story in James Acaster's superb new show at the Phoenix Theatre which hangs on him being the first UK comic to shoot several Netflix specials. He doesn't tells us this to boast; far from it. It's to set up another long-form gag, one of several lengthy and interconnected stories he tells in Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, the two-part tale of the best and worst years of his life.Previous shows by Acaster – for which he has received five nominations at the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Awards – have been surreal inventions, with few personal references (or at least those you could Read more ...

Suited and booted, Tom Allen and Suzi Ruffell presented this gala preview to the Leicester Comedy Festival, which is now in its 26th year and starts next month. The comics, who do an occasional podcast together called Like Minded, make an engaging double act – although their solo shows couldn't be more different.Ruffell is loud, energetic and talks a mile a minute. Allen is urbane, laidback and slyly caustic. But in matching DJs they teamed up for presenting duties and showed why the podcast is so successful; they bounce off each other brilliantly and nattered away like an old couple between Read more ...

In 2016 Catherine Tate performed live comedy for the first time since her Edinburgh Fringe days at the beginning of her career, and the show was deservedly both a critical and box-office success. She later took it to Australia and New Zealand and now finishes with a West End run, with some updated sketches and two new cast members.Tate's best-known characters from her television series all make an appearance; Derek Faye, the elderly gay man in denial of his sexuality (“How very dare you”), Irish nurse Bernie, passive-aggressive office worker Kate (“Go on, have a guess”), Geordie Georgie, Read more ...

The highlight of 2018 for me was the return of two mighty sets of talents – Flight of the Conchords and The League of Gentlemen – and it was heartwarming to see that they had lost none of their sharpness, wit or love of performing in front of a live audience. In stand-up, while a lot of established comics were again producing the goods, one newcomer, a young Irishwoman, stood out. We lost some comedy legends this year, too – Ken Dodd, Barry Elliott of the Chuckle Brothers and Jim Bowen, who had all had a career resurgence as a new generation had discovered their work, are now, to borrow Dodd' Read more ...

As openings go, the first night of Hari Kondabolu's standup residency at Soho Theatre was pretty memorable, so get to American Hour in good time as he is trying to pull off the same trick when he can (no spoilers, but it involves quite a bit of planning for each performance, so he may not). It's a clever spoof on the “all Asians look the same to me” trope so beloved of white racists.Racism is something Kondabolu, a chatty and assured American whose parents emigrated from south India to the United States, knows about, and he starts with a riff on how people (mis)pronounce his name is so Read more ...

You might think that, given the upheaval we are living through, political comics would be 10 a penny but, surprisingly, they’re thin on the ground. Regardless of how any rivals he has, though, Matt Forde is surely the outstanding political comic working today.Brexit Through the Gift Shop is his latest state-of-the-nation show and, despite his previous career as a Labour Party adviser and his avowed Blairite, pro-EU views, it’s one that anybody who is remotely politically engaged can enjoy, not least for Forde’s breadth of knowledge and the way he distils the complexities of modern politics Read more ...

Anyone who has seen a previous Dave Gorman show or his television series Modern Life Is Goodish knows what to expect: a show that's part lecture, part conversation, all pedantry, done with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation – clicker, laptop and onstage big screen as important as the patter, the text on screen often providing an addendum gag to the one he has already told, or increasing our anticipation of a payoff yet to come.Which is not to say that his latest show, With Great PowerPoint Comes Great ResponsibilityPoint, is more of the same-old. Yes, there's more of his forensically Read more ...

The #MeToo movement is barely a year old, but it is already prompting some clever and insightful comedy – from standalone jokes or set-pieces in several comics’ shows, or, here, a very funny but frequently discomfiting hour that delves deep into the subjects of gender, relationships and toxic masculinity.Natalie Palamides, an LA-based actress, burst on to the UK comedy scene last year with her award-winning show Laid, which examined motherhood and fertility, and much beyond. Nate initially appears to follow in the same vein: a mime to start the show, then some daft interactive comedy to Read more ...