Pleasance Courtyard – The Cellar Aug 8-14, 16-29 (18:05)
The Cellar at the Pleasance Courtyard is a simple black box venue, my favourite style of comedy space. It really helps the mind to engage with the act. Today it was Katie Pritchard, who has previously won best act at the Musical Comedy Awards and tonight’s show, her debut hour at that, totally represented her well-worthy of such an accolade.
The theme was set around her ex partner/flatmate leaving her. It was a musical bonanza like mixing every possible variety of Walker’s Crisps in a bowl and eating them with chocolate. You really never knew where she was going next, & that’s what made the show so exciting. Disco Ball is simply bursting full of wonderful and weirdly random content; I particularly enjoyed Kate Bush’s ghost while the audience were fully immersed in the 2-letter word scrabble song.
Katie mentions she can play 12 instruments and I found her to be a supremely talented singer, belting out some fantastic & funny lyrics of which I loved the hilarious & melodic ‘I wish Robert De Nero was in Cats.’ With audio-described costume changes we experienced everything from burlesque to rap. Katie was very interactive with the audience, she is super bubbly, giggly and highly energetic. She also critiqued herself throughout in a most tongue in cheek fashion which endeared us to even more.
An awesomely brave performance set to shift you from your comfort zone and tickle your funny bone. Definitely worth a watch if you’re out & about day-drinking.
Just the Tonic at The Caves Aug 8-14, 16-28 (14:20)
238 lunar months have passed since the finale of the supernova 2019 Fringe. Since then we have had socially distanced mini-fringes in people’s back gardens thro the summer of 2020, & last year’s ‘Five Percent Fringe’ which I attended rather like the time your third cousin thrice removed adds you to the wedding guest list cos they don’t have any real mates. But, 2022 is a completely different story & the world has once again descended on an Edinburgh August with much enthusiasm to entertain & be entertained. Its also given all the artists 3 years to perfect their shows. In one particular corner a legion wanders amongst us wondering who is set to change the face of comedy, & who is taking a year out to just enjoy themselves & try the material that they really like, while all the time industry opinion lies like hungry sharks off the estuaries of Peru.
So, to Hannah Fairweather, my first comedian of 2022. I’d set off from home on Arran on the 11 am ferry & reached Waverly at 2.12, giving me precisely 8 minutes to make the show. Arriving out of breath I took a seat at the back in time to hear Hannah’s irrepressibly seductive opening salvoes, a really entertaining introductory unicorn bounce thro, ‘hello I’m Hannah, & welcome to my show’. I was immediately glad to be there.
Before I started doing this I thought I was my own worst critic
Hannah’s sparkling sense of humour began life as a defence mechanism, & has now turn’d into a full-blown career, & as she spreads her comedy’s metaphysical arms around the room, an hour with her flows rapidly, it really does. Entering the corridors & chambers of her theme, we met a number of individuals in Hannah’s life who have wound her up the wrong way, & are now getting it. After the starbirth opening, the show trots on at more sedate a pace where it felt like Hannah was striking a box of comedy matches, her flaring punchlines & epithetical observations illuminating the room with the laughter-light of her clear talent. One of the matches would occasionally be dud, for me anyway that is, tho’ I did feel the room was enjoying the entirety rather more than I was.
Young, humble, exquisitely intelligent & artistically eloquent, Hannah gives her all with a face that is a constant & inviting portrait of lambkin happiness. She’s proper buzzing, you can tell, & that thoroughly infected the room. For me, I think her ability to find & convert comedy is a gift, & OK she’s relatively young, so maybe with the garnering of more life experience her material will be injected with better stuff than getting caught drinking in an American student dorm. She should be striding forward into an optimistic future & not looking back in time for up to a decade with a hiss. But that’s the only negative, I think, she was generally & genuinely funny, & its worth a visit just to laugh at, & with, Hannah. She’s on at 2.20 in the afternoon, so just go!
Underbelly, Bristo Square – Daisy Aug 8-15, 17-29 (16:15)
This is my second dose of Sasha Ellen in Edinburgh. The first was in 2018, a delightful tale of when she & her boyfriend brought one of the Channel Islands to a halt. I remember comparing her comedy to the rising bubbles of a bottle of prosecco on a summer’s day. Four years on the prosecco has morphed into Havana rum & I can definitely feel her experience & intelligence crafting a fluffy-soul’d comedy souffle, whose only true theme is that of making us laugh.
I am this close to mounting quizmaster Dave – medicate me!
She’s like a cool comedy kitten is our Sasha – I say ‘our’ because she really does make you feel that you’re one of her mates. Y’know, the mate that every ebullient bundle of hormones & horniness needs to bounce their brilliance off. Her material is a blend of white-knuckle risqué & teenage nerdiness – her idea of bagging a doctor is a level 9 healer in D&D. The way she rolls thro her show is meteor-like, an incandescent blaze of comedy that slices thro’ the stratosphere of a Scottish afternoon.
My favorite part of the show was when she went off mic for 3 minutes & 30 seconds to relate the story of an incident in her life which lasted the exact same amount of time. This was the moment when Sasha’s talent for audience intimacy really shone through. The overriding feeling is Sasha loves what she does, & she certainly has master’d the comedian’s main obligation in life which is to find humour in all situations. She’s a natural, & there’s also a subtle sophistication behind her act which is camouflaged by her gloriously giddy approach to performance.
Just the Tonic at the Caves (Just Up the Stairs) Aug 4 – 14, 17:05
Great to be back at the amazing 2022 Edinburgh Fringe festival with thousands of show up for selection; mood is good as you find your way among the streets. Today’s play by the incredibly hard working Amber Glancy is a solo show held at the Just the tonic at the caves venue down in Cowgate called ‘Wine Show’.
With polished wine glasses set on tables the small room quietened, Amber took to stage all in white. The wine part happened quickly as bottles were opened and glasses were drunk. In fact the first 5 min were dedicated to that but not without a really good plot line, she tied everything together of things we weren’t even aware of.
The come as you go element to her comedy/theatre proved easy for her as she quickly made for crowd participation. At one point I though the whole room was in on a set up because that was how surreal it all had become, for all the people who she roped into sharing her stage seemed to have great acting prowess.
The heralded wine literally poured and flew into the room she told her tale as the character Bailey Barrel, a wine maker, all she wanted to do was taste wine for a living. By now she was red from the spilled wine that she guzzled tasting each glass in excitement coming through with electric energy. She knew how to walk the stage and compel the room.
Her comedy was wicked, very dry and energetically endearing to happily watch for the next event to come whatever that may have been. She seemed panicked a lot but that could have been due to the characters father’s death. We were in her club, washed with alcohol, looking absurdly into the future she did her damndest to spread joy and energy (that she very cleverly slowly built up).
From all the chaos to ensue the writing didn’t falter, she displayed the skill of drawing out the story. Amber even toyed and cajoled with her audience. Time flew filled with how she grew in stature, she absorbed the act making a feeling of deep satisfaction and a feeling of being looked after. She is a multitalented playwright who has worked for a long time in LA, America, and has been involved in screen and stage.
Her experience shone through in this accomplished show, how to probe and fall about (without injury). Using live action to extenuate jokes and personal deprecation; a live comedy that will swim very well at the fringe I feel to blow other shows away.
Monkey Barrel Comedy Aug 7-12, 14-18, 22-28 (18.10)
#Pierre Novellie originally wrote this show to be performed at the Fringe in 2020. He’s had 3 years then to hone this hour of finely distilled impotent fury, and it really shows. This is, almost, a faultless performance of high-status musings on all of the things he does not enjoy about life, and there are many of them.
Novellie is akin to a stand-up Doctor Strange, and we the audience his Peter Parker. He escorts us on a voyage through a mental multi-verse of realities featuring cameos from ‘big pharma bro’s’, silicon valley CEO’s, survivalists, ‘fishing people’ & a very famous ‘piss-goblin’. To keep the audience on track requires an intimidating arsenal of talent, charm, and skillful delivery. Thankfully, he has all of these in abundance.
He holds pauses with a light confidence, & his weaponised enunciation & tactically applied repetition of key phrases is punctuated beautifully with eyes, brows, grins and grimaces. This is a performer who considers the weight & nuance of every aspect of their delivery, to allow the audience to slowly inhabit his ‘other world’, & gently pull us in. Make no mistake, the audience needs these finger holds. The main body of the show is a truly wonderful, & labyrinthine, flight of inner monologue fantasy. As Novellie himself warns us, these are ‘decision tree thought processes which can spiral into destruction’. Next time you consider asking a friend, or partner, “What are you thinking?”, you may have second thoughts.
As with all of the finest performers of densely layered, thematic, comedy, Pierre allows the set itself to do all the work here. There is an easy confidence dripping from him as the hour progresses, beading like the fine sweat on his brow, and hanging from his frame as he moves about the stage like the fabulous, tailored, velvet dinner jacket he sports to make corporeal his affected superiority to the chattering classes who ruin his evenings at the theatre with their reeking Pringles and drunken chit chat. This is John Kearns level of surreal storytelling excellence which Novellie delivers with his own matured, idiosyncratic, mastery.
There is only one weak section of the show, and given the incredibly high quality of the rest of the material it stands out a little sorely. The jokes about Tesco meal deals are a little too close to Peter Kay territory for my own liking, and this material jars with the Spike Milligan surrealism of the stand-out flight of fancy section in Berlins famous Berghain nightclub. If you can leave an entire room in stitches whilst riffing on bodily fluids, mayonnaise, BDSM, & fish blood at 5pm on a Thursday, you’ve probably found your calling in life.
I had the pleasure about 7 or 8 years ago of watching a group of my favourite stand ups performing a ‘super-group’ midnight show, and I accidentally ended up with Pierre as company for the evening. Throughout that set we both guffawed, heaved, yelped and squealed in delight whilst watching masters of the art, and several future award winners, freely do their thing in joyous fashion, in front of a room packed with adoring fans. It felt a great privilege then to find myself watching Pierre performing to precisely this level, and receiving the same rapturous applause, himself. It is apposite in the extreme that with “Why can’t I just enjoy things?” he has joined a pantheon Fringe classics, & comedy greats, which includes so many of his own favourite performers.
Pleasance Courtyard Grand Venue 33 (16:00) Till 29th August (Tuesdays excepted and strikes permitting) Strobe lighting Possible Brouhaha
An hour long drum solo performed by two French hippies/mime artists and featuring a kazoo trombone fashioned from the plumbing aisle at B&Q is a hard sell. and would have me reaching for my gun. On hearing this pitch the temptation is to roll the eyes and stride off indignantly muttering ‘festival bollox.. grumble grumble…’
There is no doubt the festival has its share of ‘Macbeth on a bouncy castle‘ codswallop, and long may it reign, but these things are not everyones cup of tea. So you’d be forgiven for dismissing this show out of hand. and flicking the safety off*
You would however be missing a cracking percussive hour of virtuoso drumming visuals and music that thrums along as tight as a paradiddle.
First and foremost these guys are world class drummers.
They employ a surreal quiver of instruments, from drills with which to torture their instruments and each other. From the aforementioned kazoobone (ed.?) to chainsaws and their skulls, and more. They belt out the classics from Queen to AC/DC via Pantera and Grease with brioche (ed. I think you’ll find you mean brio) Of course being French you get a bit of Jean-Michel Jarre and Daft Punk. (Mais qui, d’accord, bien sûr, pôt pourri).
As they are the only two French recording artists since Edith Piaf that anybody takes seriously. MC Solar doesn’t count.*
The dynamic between the pair is played upon but not dwelt upon. Excellently conceived vignettes are conjured. Morricone’s Wild West, Bruce Lee style Martial arts movies and Star Wars. There is crowd participation, but this involves a bit of whooping and stomping and not the the dreaded dragged up on stage variety.
The audience loved it from kiddie winks to ‘aul grumpy punters (like me). The lighting sound musicianship choreography and timing are all as tight John Bonham’s trousers and everyone left with a smile on their face and a slight ringing in the ears. Excellent.
Just the Tonic at the Tron Aug 6-14, 16-28 (17.00)
‘Easter Eggs’, in modern parlance, are hidden delights which add layers and meaning to the central narrative, within computer games. Players only find if they really want to seek them out, if this particular computer game is ‘just your thing’. Sitting on the train back to Fife after a full days reviewing, I glanced over my notes for Erynn Tett’s masterful hour long set of surreal one liners and audience based market research, and found myself presented with Easter eggs by the bucketload.
The basement of the Tron holds a special place in my heart. It was here that I first saw Mick Ferry floor a multinational audience of drunks, tourists, and steamers with his working mans club act of untouchable class. It was also where I found myself in a heckling match with Doug Stanhope, in front of my ex-girlfriend and her new fiancé. I am no stranger to a breadth of emotional responses within this particular steamy comedy dungeon. This perhaps prepared me for the fabulously idiosyncratic, often challenging, but never less than captivating hour of truly original material I ‘experienced’ at the hands of a performer who segued between the delivery of Steven Wright, a sad sack, awkward and incredibly spectrumy one-liner master from the states, physical comedy with all the precision awkwardness of Emo Philips, and a corporate automaton who flummoxes the participants in the ‘feedback’ sessions by using ratings analogies which, whilst obtuse, were still more instantly fathomable than around 50% of the material delivered as outright comedy.
Make no mistake, the one-liners in this set veer from odd, to plain surreal. Topics covered include cocky geraniums, insecure chameleons, and car parks in deep denial of their true nature. If this sounds like polarising material, Tett herself confirms so, highlighting that she ‘broke-up a family’ last week, when it came to the market research sections of her show. Audience participation is gentle, though compulsory, and it was genuinely intriguing in such a small crowd to see how audience members responded to the opinions of others, and manipulation via the previously described bizarre & opaque ratings frameworks & KPI measures which each audience member was huckled into using to validate their own opinions on the show so far. I for one was enthralled.
It is not only the originality of the material which makes this show a triumph, it is Tett’s commitment to character, and clowning prowess, which truly draws you in. It constantly feels close to car crash territory, and yet this is actually a superbly structured piece of art which Richard Gadd would be proud of. Another of the Bearpit Podcast alumni, Mat Ewins, came to mind whenever the audio visual aids popped in to robotically communicate that we were entering ‘review’ phase. The attention to detail in every area was meticulous.
If this all feels a bit much for you, then it quite possibly would be. This is not a show for everyone, and in committing so fully to that Erryn Tett has created an hour of performance which is funny, of it’s time, and bitingly satirical. It also allows Tett to deliver a show which achieves precisely what it subtly hopes to achieve in skewering the onslaught of algorithms omnipresent in our daily lives, dumbing down, and homogenising tastes, to the N’th degree.
Throughout the show, we are presented with feedback from previous audiences, one notable quote from an audience member halfway through a previous set was “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but I’m having a nice time”. One of todays crowd was bold enough, when asked, to state that he would recommend this show to precisely 93% of his friends. I can only feel sorry for those in his circle considered to be the unadventurous 7%.
Compulsive viewing of the highest order, and given that the performance I watched was her second preview, this award worthy hour of stand up/come performance art/come interactive theatre is likely to yet hit its true stride. Get down to see it at the Tron before the 5 star reviews start flooding in, and the nominations start stacking up.
Gilded Balloon – Patter House Aug 5-15, 17-28 (15.40)
The Patter House is situated at the bottom of Chambers St and is a grand arena for a comedy show. With many venue spaces inside I waited at the colourful bar until being shown to the room where Lucy Frederick awaited. She is a regular on the comedy circuit having appeared at The Top Secret Comedy Club, The Stand and Just the Tonic amongst lots of others. Now she’s in Edinburgh strutting her stuff; an energetic, confident and candid story-teller who had a philosophical and very comical approach to teaching the audience the value of self-love and acceptance. Her wedding anecdotes got many giggles despite the audience was early-Fringe quiet. She has a big personality designed for a big audience and her show would make a great start to any girly night out. The boys will love it too, but Lucy definitely appeals to the wee princess in all the ladies’ hearts.
I thoroughly enjoyed her theatrical delivery, while the power-point presentation of photographs gave a very personal touch to a witty portrayal of what it feels like to get hitched. My favourite part was the anecdote about her granny talking to her deaf grandad. Lucy enacted the entire conversation and I felt like I was in the very room with her & her grandparents, while making a serious subject humorous without being offensive. Excellent suspension of disbelief.
Watching Lucy in full flow felt at times as though I was being subliminally therapised into feeling confident and happy within myself. Very relatable content and I wish her all the best in her marriage and for her future shows.
As any gigging comic will tell you, one-liners are a deceptively simple form of stand-up comedy. The timing, the tone, the pace and the punctuation of every single gag requires a level of dedication and sheer bloody mindedness to master. I’ve been fortunate enough to have the joyous experience of watching one of the masters of the art, Masai Graham, perform 30 minute sets which contained as much consideration and dedication to their crafting as a 2hr Stewart Lee performance. So for Will Mars to dedicate a full hour, and a semi-autobiographical one at that, to the artform, is a bold statement of intent.
To deliver a whole set of one liners one needs to consider that an audience can only laugh for so long without feeling exhausted, and that preceding gags inevitably present an unavoidable economy of diminishing returns if delivered at a tempo which renders them subliminal to the crowd. Mars warmed up the crowd with some nicely high energy Daft Punk tunes which I hoped was to mitigate for the Thursday afternoon, sweat drenched slumber which takes over even the most committed of fans in the inevitable dungeons of whichever large venue one has been allocated by, in this instance, The Gilded Balloon. I murmured a soft prayer that it was not a portent of the pace of the performance to come.
This concern was dispelled from the moment our host’s droll Northern tone came through the PA system announcing the beginning of the show. 3 gags were delivered before Will had begun treading the boards, and rather than knocking us off our feet with the sharpest lines of the set, he warmed us up to the tone of the engaging, honest, funny and at times genuinely next level show we were about to receive.
There was a broad spread of demographics throughout the room, and over the course of the laid back, yet break-neck, 55 minutes and 300 gags, the laughter rippled around the room like waveforms. This is one of the most masterful aspects of Will’s show, he manages to deliver a set which has moments that everyone present could connect with. A recurring theme throughout my day of reviewing was white male comedians taking a beautifully human swipe at their own privileges in a manner which very much defies the notion that being ‘Woke’, & being precious, easily offended and virtue signalling are mutually exclusive things.
We are eased into the performance via clear status setting. He is ‘not good with people’, and ‘even dogs hate him’, and if it weren’t for the fantastically crafted darker sections of his act I would have complained that the low status positioning didn’t sit with the effortless performance and genuine warmth for the audience which came off the stage throughout. As mentioned earlier though, one liner sets are all about pacing, and Will Mars crafted this particular marathon with the skill and nounce of a ‘couch to 5k’ podcast coach. Some lovely ‘Yo mama’ gags, about himself, in which he dissected his neuroses and laid out groundwork for heavier material about his upbringing, showed his versatility with the form, and offered us a metaphorical ‘cup of tea’ to let us know he wouldn’t be spilling out his yarn in double quick time. He was not more eager to perform than to story-tell. This allowed the audience to appreciate the slick changes of pace when he moved into a more interactive mode, or crafted wickedly sharp close to the bone jokes on topics which most would comedians who aren’t Frankie Boyle would be too anxious to broach at 3pm.
There are very topical and serious themes of imposter syndrome, poverty, childhood abandonment, breast feeding, and domestic violence woven throughout genuinely gut busting 1 punch hits. I laughed so hard I was accused of being a shill at more than one point. The audience interaction showed Mars to be a confident and playful performer, and his decision to narrate a large portion of his own performance in the third person allowed him an intimacy with his audience that produced one of the most obscene and surreal flights of pornographic fancy I’ve seen spontaneously produced. ‘Tyrone’, the very handsome man sitting not too far to my right, I suspect may be traumatised. The rest of us were delighted.
There is still a lot of work to be done to polish this show up into the sum of it’s parts, and I was reviewing on a preview day. It is also inevitable that in a show with 300 gags there are going to be a couple of non-sequiters, and muddled linkage between sections interrupted the otherwise excellent timing on a couple of occasions. Given that the show was 55 minutes of one-liners, and a mini-story of Will’s life, a clearer form of delineation between the ‘sections’ would also have been beneficial. I would however pay hard cash any day of the week to see the topical aspects of this show played to anyone who thinks you can’t make good jokes about hard subjects and not punch down. There were numerous occasions when ‘sensitive’ topics which could have delivered 70’s style cheap laughs instead subverted expectations and presented our performer as someone we could all connect with. Quite an achievement for a show which is ‘just’ one liners. This is a talented man with a Fringe show that gives the punters exactly what they want. I left the performance with a smile on my face, laughter lines around my eyes, and a genuine warmth in my belly.
Every Sunday I like to go to Stockbridge & buy a couple of pounds of my favorite grapes, which arrive there from Mauritius that morning. Chomping on a juicy handful last Sunday, I began making my way up through the New Town, arriving in the York Place area where the trams are. This is Stand country, & a few years ago was the epicentre of laughter in the Fringe. These days its all a bit like a weekday wake & might as well be out in Fife, for there has been a seismic shift to one Edinburgh street in particular – the sloping, cobbled thoroughfare between the Cowgate & the Bridges that is Blair Street. This is the real epicentre of Fringe comedy these days; where comedians, punters & flyerers mingle in a smiling Sunset Strip.
Things evolve, & the stranglehold The Stand had on making people pay for ‘safe’ mainstream comedy has been utterly smashed by the innovations of the Free Fringe & its quality, liberty-laden shows. All things change – I mean I’m actually writing this article on a speech-to-text app walking through Holyrood Park on the way into town. So if Fringe comedy can evolve, what about the ancient art of reviewing. Think of those ancient Greeks who first stepped down from the Dionysis theatre during the reign of Pesistratus, who had just observed the very first play there from its seats, who have been babbling opinions & critiques to each other as soon as they left the hilltop. Criticism is as old as the performance art it observes, so how does its own evolution fare in 2022?
Well, not that much really. Beyond the windows of Mumble Towers, the Fringe Press of 2022 seems an archaic institution – chained to amateur rules dished out by a hereditary feudal demense, & a narrow luddite marking system which, even if the stars are split into halves, can only ever give a ‘marks out of ten’ assessment. But half-stars are an ugly aesthetic, a deformed evolution of the species. Like Darwin says, it’s not the biggest or the fastest that survives, but the one that adapts. If the five-star marking system is not to go extinct, it must evolve from its primitive 5-point Ape, through the Homo Erectus 10-point system of halves, & into something more suitable for an increasingly sophisticated modern world.
The trained reviewer can actually feel a show’s quality as 1,2,3,4,5 within moments of the start. So what are the qualities that provide such an esoteric sensation. Since 2016, the Mumble had identified three factors in each of its genres. For Comedy, we had Material, Delivery & Laughs; while for Theatre we had Stagecraft, Script & Performance. This was an improvement on the old system, where now in essence a score was obtained between 1 and 15, the Neanderthal if you will. As the Mumble went into the 2019 Fringe, we were still using this system, but have finally recognized there was still a certain imprecision to the score.
The old system (R.I.P)
Under our old system, to obtain four stars, for example, a show needed to score 3.66 – which is simply closer to 4 than 3. The overall marks would then be described as a low four, a natural four or a high four. The eureka moment came the other day while sitting in two comedy shows. On one occasion I was the only one laughing, while at the other show the room was in uproar & I was sat stony-gilled. It was time to add that factor into the marking mix, the Room… how does a comedian play their audience, do they keep tickling funny bones like a comedy octopus, or is each viewer sat there playing on their phones.
A four-star Room at Gary G Knightley
The Room category in Comedy has a natural cousin in Theatre. I have called it S.O.D, with the first review to use it being published in 2019. Quick off the mark, the company sent me this email;
Dear Mumble
We have asked our wonderful PR company; we have asked the amazing Pleasance Press Office; we have asked the astonishing Head of Programming at The Pleasance – no one can help. We are delighted by our review by the excellent Daniel Donnelly, but no one seems to know what S.O.D. stands for!
Please can you elucidate?
Many thanks (and I’ll get the prize for the first one home with the answer!)
The answer is, of course, Suspension of Disbelief. I know my poetry, & within Coleridge’s wonderful Biographia Literia, he elucidated on the driving phantasian spirit behind his co-creation of the Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth. Its essence is the state of mind reached where there is, ‘a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith… awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.’ In modern lay terms its like switching off reality & becoming immersed in the production. Is that your mate Nigel before you? Do you see them behind the make-up, or are you lost in the drama & believe this drag-queen before you is the fabulous Nigella?
The introduction of another genome into the star system, the aforetitled Expansion of the Mumbleverse, seems wholly natural. Our planet is divided into four seasons, the main elements are still earth, fire, air & water. The four bodily humors were part of Shakespearean cosmology, inherited from the ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses divided the Ages into Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. Now the reviewing star system can also be divided into four harmonious parts. Marking-wise, to obtain those 4 stars, a show must now be awarded at least 3.75 points as opposed to 3.66. The overall marking goes like this
As cultural surveyors, The Mumble can now give a more detailed account of a show for both artist & potential audience member – its now a case of, “you need to sort your tiles out, pal, and there’s a bit of damp in your back bedroom – you’re wirings seen better days and of course you’re gonna have to update your boiler system, it’ll never pass the new laws.“
Mumble Comedy 