James Acaster has certainly been studying his craft since he made his Fringe debut with an unmemorable show last year, and it shows in Prompt. Lots of comedy tropes are utilised, some of them to great effect, while others feel simply mechanical. He uses repetition, callbacks, audience participation in a show full of whimsy and the most surprising subjects for comedy.
Tony Law, Canadian by way of Trinidad and Tobago, has been kicking around the comedy circuit for several years with a style of madcap humour that many have delighted in but others have found self-indulgent. But with Maximum Noonsense he has retained all the free-flowing joy of his comedy while reining in some of the slacker elements. It's a marvellous concoction of silliness and sly humour.
Everybody will be familiar with Tommy Sheridan's story, and not necessarily because they closely follow Scottish politics at their most internecine. Rather because the Glaswegian socialist went from being barely a paragraph in broadsheets to being plastered over the front pages of tabloids after a series of revelations – which he strongly denies – about visiting swingers' clubs.
Scottish schoolchildren are brought up on Robert Burns but other British students aren't so fortunate. We may know snatches of the great man's work – “Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie”, “O, my Luve's like a red, red rose” and so on – but few of us could recite even a stanza of Tam o' Shanter.
Les Dennis may have started his career as a comic, and then as a presenter of cheesy, family-friendly television game shows, but of late he has been plying his trade as a very decent actor. And so it proves again in Tony Staveacre's one-man play about a washed up Liverpudlian club comic.
Here is the news: dismemberment, suicide bombers, industrial-strength Japanese porn, paedophilia and the descent of Julian Assange from hero to zero. The son of a priest and a superstar in his homeland, Swedish comic Betner is drawn to the dark stuff (come to think of it, there’s not much of a leap between Betner and bête noire), and his show latched on to the mood of post-Olympics comedown and held fast.
Liam Mullone might perform his hour of clever, quietly simmering stand-up flanked by a faithful toy raccoon called Mr Eek, but there’s nothing fluffy about his material. Mullone targets knee-jerk liberalism with a steel toe-capped intellect. He takes it as read that the likes of the EDL are deeply unpleasant knuckleheads; it’s just that people who get their kicks by constantly pointing out the fact aren’t necessarily much better.
Miss Julie is pretty full-on at the best of times but in Yael Farber’s striking new version, Strindberg’s themes of class and gender are given a shocking modern makeover. In transposing the action to present-day South Africa, she has written a story about the divide that still exists between the haves and have-nots, and the crippling emotional history that has yet to be overcome by the young nation.
In the 1990s Rosie Wilby was lurking on the outer edges of Britpop with her band Wilby, whose giddy career highlights included opening for Tony Hadley (he evacuated the entire room for the soundcheck), being clamped outside the venue while supporting Bob Geldof, and getting their own plastic name tag in the racks of Virgin Megastore.