Latest news with #MischiefTheatre
Scotsman
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Susan Harrison asks ‘Should I Still Be Doing This?' in character-filled Fringe hour
Acclaimed character comedian Susan Harrison is set to return to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with her latest solo show 'Susan Harrison: Should I Still Be Doing This?', running at the Gilded Balloon's Appleton Tower venue from the 30th of July to the 24th August (excluding the 12th and 18th of August). Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Directed by comedian and artist Ben Target, the hour-long show explores the challenges and absurdities of midlife through a vivid lineup of female characters — from a frustrated Mancunian panda to an emotionally reflective Motorola Razr phone. Harrison, known for her work with Olivier Award-winning Showstopper! The Improvised Musical and Mischief Theatre's Mischief Movie Night, brings a distinctive blend of absurdism, social commentary and comic pathos to the stage. This marks her sixth solo show at the Fringe and her first since developing new radio and TV projects with long-time writing partner Lucy Trodd. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Among the characters featured is Sindy, the often-overlooked doll who has been struggling with self-esteem issues in the wake of Barbie's cinematic resurgence. There's also Fleur Delish, a social media lifestyle guru who moonlights as a spirit animal reader and skincare influencer, and a woman literally trapped in conflict with a small girl she's accidentally swallowed. (c) MATT STRONGE 'Susan Harrison is one of the most inventive character comedians on the circuit today,' said a spokesperson for the Gilded Balloon. 'Her latest show looks set to be one of the standout comic performances of this year's Fringe.' Harrison's previous work has earned critical acclaim including a Three Weeks Editor's Choice Award for her show Creatures, a BAFTA as part of the cast of Class Dismissed, and a 2022 Panto Award for innovation with audience interaction. She is also known for her viral online comedy videos, including her take on Liz Truss and a memorable sketch featuring the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft. In 2024, Harrison and Trodd's radio sitcom pilot Hopping aired on BBC Radio 4, and is now in development for television. Harrison has also appeared in The Simon Day Show, Emergency Broadcast and The Paternoster Gang audio series within the Doctor Who universe. Susan Harrison: Should I Still Be Doing This? will run daily at 7.40pm at Gilded Balloon – Appleton Tower – Pip. Tickets are available via the Fringe box office.
Time Out
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Ncuti Gatwa regenerates into Olly Alexander as the NT's ‘Importance of Being Earnest' transfers to London's West End
Ncuti Gatwa's time on Doctor Who proved to be pretty brief. But he didn't put his feet up in the gap between his two seasons – theatre was his first love and he got straight back on that stage last Christmas to star in the National Theatre's hallucinogenically camp take on Oscar Wilde's classic 'The Importance of Being Earnest', the first the NT had staged since the '80s. The Max Webster-directed production was a roaring great hit and now it's set to transfer to the West End, replacing Mischief Theatre's ' The Comedy About Spies ' at the Noël Coward Theatre. Gatwa's not coming along though: whether he'd have been up for it is a moot point, as he's already busy starring in the RSC's new West End play Born with Teeth. However, a fine replacement has been found for the role of young 'bachelor' about town Algernon Montcrieff: it's Olly Alexander, who hasn't been in Doctor Who but did make his name as actor in ' It's A Sin ', another show by Russell T Davies. Wilde's play is very much an ensemble affair and there is no news on further casting at this stage, though we dare to dream that the mighty Sharon D Clarke will return as the formidable Lady Bracknell. If you want to know a little more about what the production was like last time, then read our four-star review here. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025.
Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Shucked review — this clever screwball musical is perfect escapism
★★★★★These are bleak times, but the good news is that you can escape it all by visiting three new or new-ish shows that all use gloriously funny meta humour. The Mischief Theatre team romp through every espionage joke under the sun in The Comedy About Spies, while the cast of Titanique mercilessly send up James Cameron's ocean-liner bombast. And now, at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, you can wallow in a screwball musical putting Grand Ole Opry pieties through the shredder. Shucked, which opened on Broadway two years ago, is the hilarious opening shot in Drew McOnie's inaugural season as artistic director. It delivers a diet of puns — clever, raunchy and sometimes knowingly cheap — as two lovers take a wrong
Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
James Bond meets Abbott and Costello in The Comedy about Spies
Out-and-out comedies are so rare and hard to do that it's no wonder we adore the few that pull it off. Noises Off is on tour on its umpteenth revival; Fawlty Towers is back in London soon before going on tour. The Play That Goes Wrong is in its 11th year in the West End after starting life in a room above a pub. Its creators, Mischief Theatre, whose members are still in their mid-thirties, have made it big by zeroing in on the big laughs. Their focus is always formidable, even if their results vary. The Play That Goes Wrong is supremely well-mounted but overreliant on characters who increasingly don't seem to worry that their stage whodunnit is falling to pieces. And yes, I
Time Out
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
The Play That Goes Wrong
This comedy has, of course, actually done everything right. Produced by LAMDA graduates Mischief Theatre, the show has had successful runs at the Old Red Lion in Islington, Trafalgar Studios, and in Edinburgh; now it's made it all the way to the West End. Amid all the chatter about the overbearing West End dominance of jukebox musicals and film spin-offs, it's cheering to see a dynamic young company land slap-bang in the middle of Theatreland. The show is a farcical play-within-a-play. Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society are mounting a production of a hoary old sub-'Mousetrap' mystery called 'The Murder at Haversham Manor'. From the first moment, in which a hapless stage manager attempts to secure a collapsing mantelpiece, we suspect that things are not going to go to plan. And that, indeed, is the case, as the production shudders painfully into chaos, taking in everything from dropped lines to disintegrating sets, intra-cast fighting, technical malfunctions of the highest order, and an unexpectedly resuscitated corpse. The show sits in a fine tradition of British slapstick, and of plays about theatrical blunders: its debt to Michael Frayn's hilarious 'Noises Off', about the gradual disintegration of a touring rep production, is considerable. This is, to be fair, acknowledged by the play's marketing, which calls it — correctly — ''Fawlty Towers' meets 'Noises Off''. But the trouble is that anyone who has seen, and loved, 'Noises Off', is likely to find the comparison unfavourable: Frayn's play simply does all the same things, and does them better. Still, there are laughs to be had here, and the production is a technical triumph: ensuring that props and sets collapse on cue, without actually injuring anyone, is a genuine feat of stage management.
