Expösed – a titan of fashion’s personal standing is seen to flag (Baby Lamb Productions at Accidental Theatre until Saturday 7 February and then London)

Some of the freshest theatre comes from companies formed from young actors who’ve trained together and graduated from drama courses and colleges. It can be raw and rough around the edges, but it puts training into practice and is full of an urgency to create.

Founded by alumni from The Oxford School of Drama, Baby Lamb Productions has brought Expösed, its comedic take on The Emperor’s New Clothes to Belfast this weekend.

Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale is a well-known story about vanity trumping common sense and pride coming before well sign-posted humiliation. Baby Lamb whisks the audience’s imagination over the Berlin Fashion Week where Ze Emperor’s latest collection has bombed. New thinking is required to rescue the reputation of his underwhelming brand, and more importantly, boost his flagging personal standing. Out of the ‘ideas stream’ jumps a collaboration with the creators of Nücloth.

Jacob Baird’s delusional Emperor (whose private philosophy is based on his fondness for The Lion King) is clad in white from top to tie, mimicking the blank canvas of his mind. His court includes the uber-cool Johan (a very believable Nicholas Alexander) who turns to contemporary dance when words fail him, and commercially savvy Yanik (Ashok Gupta dressed in Steve Jobs’ uniform). Nisha Emich plays the competent, straight-talking but totally overlooked aide Maureen with great empathy. Two ‘French’ designers offer an exclusive deal to show off their cutting-edge fabric: confident snake oil saleswoman Bree (Hannah McLeod who also directs the show) and her bumbling sidekick Oche (Kiera Murray).

The original five-minute fairy tale is satisfyingly stretched out to create a 70 minute long show with lots of visual humour, clever dialogue, slow motion sequences, puns, carefully placed sound effects, a pumping and very cheesy soundtrack, and very knowing acknowledgements of the doubling of parts across the cast of six. The ensemble mostly makes sense of the mélange of comedy styles and techniques thrown at the elongated story. The mentions of fast fashion and body positivity are mainly there for the story’s punchline, but hint at threads that could have been more fully woven into the fabric of the script.

Given that the Emperor cannot comprehend that his servant Alexa isn’t a robot, it’s no surprise that the voice of reason at his side, Maureen, is almost invisible to him. Jacob Baird’s natural Belfast accent makes the Emperor’s moment of honesty speaking truth to his own soul rather profound for the home audience. The quick costumes changes are effective, and the final crocheted outfit is certainly worth the wait.

Leaving aside very established companies like the amazing Bruiser, the Northern Ireland theatre scene doesn’t have many indigenous outfits in its pipeline like Baby Lamb with a talented ensemble of young performers creating new work that is primarily comedic in nature (and not solely focused on Norn Iron or Troubles stories). So it was a joy to sit down and enjoy the craic as the six versatile visiting performers took on ten roles and jumped from one skit to another with this witty show. It’s a great showcase for their talent, and long may their ingenuity and energy feed their ability to stage fun theatre.

You can catch the final performance of Expösed in Accidental Theatre on Saturday 7 February before their UK tour whisks them away to Lion & Unicorn Theatre in London later this month.

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The Spanking Goddess and Other Discarded Tales – less orthodox Celtic tales from master storyteller Clare Murphy (touring Ireland during September)

Irish myths and legends are part of the landscape on this island. Even my protestant-leaning primary school couldn’t avoid teaching a good dose of Finn McCool. But these stories are almost told with the sound of harps gently playing in the background. They’re sanitised, with the rough edges removed by countless retellings.

Clare Murphy’s one woman show – The Spanking Goddess and Other Discarded Tales – takes a less fluffy approach to explore the wild women who get left out of the best Celtic tales, “women who never made the cut”. Over an hour, she takes us on a raucous romp to hear how she travelled around the island, sourcing less orthodox versions of those recognisable tales. The versions where characters get down and dirty. The versions less suitable for a primary school audience … but you’ll wish you’d heard when you were younger! (Age advisory: 16+)

Why did no one mention Delgnat – wife of one of the first kings of Ireland, Partholón, – who was left alone with a fine-looking servant Topa? Just one of the badass figures who are brought to life.

There’s no set. No props. Murphy’s captivating style of storytelling is sufficient to sustain her performance, with the audience quickly charmed with her brand of humour and won over by her mythology with a twist. The script weaves around the audience reaction: there’s a clear trajectory but probably no fixed road to follow to reach the final conclusion.

Expect slurps, whispers, some gentle audience participation, otters and vaginas. And anticipate leaving the venue with a new appreciation for some familiar characters, and some less familiar figures.

The Spanking Goddess is out on tour, visiting The Duncairn in north Belfast earlier in the month. This weekend it’s in Cork, then passing through Castlebar, Sligo, spending a night in Derry The Playhouse on Saturday 27 September and finishing in Dundalk on Sunday 28 before returning to Bristol in October.

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Ciaran’s Bartlett’s Phantom of the Opera House – a dark and filthy evening rolling in the aisles (Grand Opera House until Saturday 28 September)

Ciaran Bartlett kicked off his week-long stint at the Grand Opera House this evening. True to the show title’s promise, Phantom at the Opera House begins with a touch of Lloyd-Webber’s musical which quickly morphs into a spot of Meat Loaf. Soon he’s talking sausage rolls, Patrick Swayze and twisted nipples.

A couple of days shy of his 38th birthday, Bartlett has been battling vestibular neuritis for much of this year. The prolonged bouts of vertigo may have influenced his ‘deep dive’ into darker material. Last week’s loss of a wisdom tooth has already become embedded in the routine.

Dressed in comfortable green trackie bottoms and a coarse black tea-shirt, Bartlett periodically wanders back and forth from his faraway guitar stand. Some of his songs are over before they’ve started. Others are replete with big production values, rich backing tracks and effects. A starry backdrop at the back of the stage adds a touch of class to proceedings. The flexible backlighting keeps the audience’s faces lit so the comedian can always gauge their reaction.

We’re a first night crowd, so there’s some conscious self-editing going on when throw things off with our clapping and tittering. Though I don’t think small rewrites will do anything to spare his mother’s blushes when she attends tomorrow evening. While the first half is dark, the whole show is as filthy as you could imagine.

Podcast listeners (and watchers) will be familiar with Bartlett’s wife Chloe and his musical mucker Jonny Martin. Fine musical tributes to both are included in the show. Bartlett has a fine voice, a background in crooning over his guitar in back-alley pubs, and would make a great pantomime dame at Christmas.

The front rows of the audience reveal their vulnerabilities as Bartlett channels his inner Derren Brown. Few topics are untouchable, and he carefully steps over the potential landmines presented by Jeffrey Donaldson, the McCanns, trans athletes … and even exploding pagers when prompted by the audience. There’s even a rather hangry encounter with the legendary Joe Lindsay!

Bartlett’s post-interval musical improvs based on suggestions by punters sadly run dry after just one or two stanzas, abruptly stopping as he turns to riff on another topic. But hey, he’s more confident and able to generate mirth on demand than the audience. And he made me laugh: I’m a tough audience that survived two hours of John Bishop in the SSE Arena this time seven years ago without a single guffaw.

Phantom at the Opera House continues in the Grand Opera House until Saturday 28 September.

Photo credit: Instagram/@andrearussell_xo

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The Worst Café in the World – à la carte comedy theatre (Big Telly at CQAF until Monday 6 May) #cqaf24

Big Telly (Granny Jackson’s Dead) have revived The Worst Café in the World with an updated à la carte reimagining of the original set menu extravaganza.

Shown to a table, as soon as you sit down and are offered a glass of water, you get a strong sense that everything on the food and drink menus will trigger an unexpected result. In fact, over time, part of the pleasure is in trying to imagine what skit will result from ordering particular items.

There are verbal gags aplenty, and moments when one waiter will shout an instruction – like an American footballer calling a play – and the other waiters will immediately join in these collegiate servings, as well as times when the chef will hand out props and trigger a Sharing Platter: a full one or two-minute performance for the whole café to enjoy. Big Telly are working with other partner organisations: at my sitting, NI Opera’s soprano Mary McCabe dazzled us with a gorgeous song.

While the sense of an overarching story arc is missing from this Worst Café iteration, the more casual dining experience with an ever-changing set of customers – you’ll typically stay for thirty minutes – allows you to sample a menu of simple comedy morsels and more elaborate and involved set pieces from the cast of four.

Ordering a Small Plate of Angry Scottish Wasp was one of my favourite dishes. Though a side of Trump, and a Club Sandwich washed down with some Young People Whine is good too.

This is the theatrical version of close magic. The cast have to be comfortable moving around the space, engaging and improvising with the audience, and have rapid recall for the routines that must follow a whole menu full of trigger words. Kudos to Big Telly for indoctrinating training more local actors (Cat Barter, Kealan McAllister, Vicky Allen and Michael Johnston) up in their style of madcap comedy drama. And hats off to the two chefs – stage managers Keeley Ball and Rhiannon Morgan – who keep the energy up with their curated sequence of chef selected routines.

You can book a seat at Big Telly’s pop-up café online. It’s running as part of Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival until 8pm on Monday 6 May. They’ve also just finished a run in Philadelphia and New York (where it won an innovative theatre award).

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Sunny Side Up – unsentimental, informative and shocking insight into the world of fertility (Cheesy Grin Productions at Lyric Theatre until Saturday 20 April)

Sunny Side Up is Diona Doherty’s new show that charts a woman’s struggle to have a child. And to be clear, fertilised and healthy is how Erin would like her eggs. Before long we learn how she and wee Stevie met, how their bonktastic bedroom antics didn’t lead to an easy blue line on a pregnancy test, and how they ended up in Prague to beat the three-year wait for IVF on the NHS.

It’s a story of ups and many downs. There’s heartbreak and tragedy alongside the whimsical asides – the friend on a hen night who thought she was a potato waffle deserves a whole show of her own – and the banter about Stevie’s shortcomings.

Diona paces across a giant calendar, returning at intervals to the crucially circled ‘test day’ that reveals whether Erin’s dreams will be one step closer to fulfilment. A tree looms to one side of the page-to-a-month floor, ominous and unmentioned until after the interval when its significance will bring a tear to your eye.

Sunny Side Up could easily have been a 50-minute Edinburgh Fringe-type one-woman show with Diona leaning on a mic stand and delivering the material as pure stand up. Countless comedians have used breakups, unusual families and heartfelt situations as vehicles for belly laughs and giggles. Yet the sheer myriad of amusing characters who pop up in Erin’s life, together with Patrick J O’Reilly’s direction that makes Erin/Diona inhabit the whole calendar, the rather classy sound and lighting effects, and the insistence on an interval, all suggest that this is aiming to be something greater than just comedy.

Erin opines early on in the show – “imagine if we knew then what we know now” – and probably for most in the audience, fertility isn’t something widely spoken about. (While a consultation on adding Miscarriage Leave and Pay to Northern Ireland’s Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay legislation closed in December 2022, it’s unlikely to become law until a number of other changes to employment rights for employees and employers have been co-designed and implemented over the coming months and years.)

Sunny Side Up helpfully goes where many shows wouldn’t dare to be honest and up front about the uncomfortable conversations couples have with medical professionals and how the IVF process can mess with your mind.

Diona and husband Sean Hegarty have been very open in media interviews over the years about their own fertility journey. So this audience member found it hard to disassociate Erin and Stevie from Diona and Sean, with the hunch that much of the best material will have been autobiographical (albeit accentuated for comic effect) but never quite sure what else was just dreamt up to spin a good yarn.

Sunny Side Up is a largely unsentimental, informative and at times shocking explanation of the unspoken world of fertility treatments. Diona connects the audience with her character Erin and the spermtastic and eggstraordinary tale. It made me laugh out loud – no mean feat as John Bishop probably didn’t realise in the SSE Arena back in October 2017 when I sat unmoved while much of the audience rolled in the sizeable aisles – and it made me cry. The show continues its run at the Lyric Theatre until Saturday 20 April.

Photo credit: Rebekah Hutchinson

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Give My Head Peace – familiar characters find mirth in an unreconciled society and political figures (Grand Opera House until Saturday 30 March)

The Hole in the Wall Gang are back and the audience know what to expect from the familiar characters and giddily revel in the banter. Give My Head Peace’s simple set – a sofa, a coffee table from a well-known Swedish emporium, and a dining room table – is accented with red/white/blue and green/white/orange lighting as the action flits between different sides of the community.

The Reverend Bobby Begbie (brother of the incapacitated Pastor Begbie who seems to have taken the name of his local Kneebreakers social club a little too literally) is having a crisis of faith and is troubled by God turning out to be more Catholic than Protestant. Marty Maguire ably steps into the Paddy Jenkins’ clerical shoes and has great fun bringing another thuggishly religious Begbie to life. Ciaran Nolan returns as Sandy the loyalist drinking den landlord. Their first song – the Wee Wee Blues, rhyming Sash with slash – gets the audience swaying with approval.

As the first act continues, we meet Da (Tim McGarry) and Cal (Damon Quinn), Dympna (Alexandra Ford) and Billy (Michael McDowell), and finally Ma (Olivia Nash). Da and Ma are still fighting the bit out. Dympna has had Kenough of hard work as an MLA and is rather enjoying the institutions being down. Cal is perturbed when he walks in on Da getting his leg over a petite blonde woman on the sofa.

It turns out that there are plenty of jokes that can still be squeezed out of the sectarian sponge, and while you may end up judging yourself for laughing at the simplistic stereotypes, the gang of writers also occasionally choose to play with expectations and ever-so-gently bend traditional tropes to challenge the status quo. But blink and you could miss it. The audience reward gags about Free Stayto, Paddy Kielty, Kneecap, Nolan, Jim Allister, Shane MacGowan and Gerry Adams, touts, more touts, and numerous mentions of Jeffrey and Jamie. The SDLP, Alliance and the Greens are nowhere to be seen. The political punchbags are Sinn Féin, the DUP and occasionally the UUP’s Robin Swann. By the end of the second act, we’ve had 25 minutes of topical stand-up from McGarry that includes a history lesson about Roger Casement, a spot of not-all-it-seems-adultery, and a surprisingly familiar new team heading up the Northern Ireland (I mean, Occupied Six Counties) Executive.

Hecklers: beware. You’re unlikely to be original enough not to receive solid pushback from the experienced team on stage. While the unreconciled divisions in society are a rich seam to mine, the possibility of an Irish Sea border and the characters of Jim Allister and Jamie Bryson provide the subject matter for the catchy songs to close to each act.

The Give My Head Peace 2024 tour finishes in the Grand Opera House on Saturday 30 March.

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Tom Moran is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar – an exceptional level of honesty and openness (Lyric Theatre until Wednesday 19 July before Edinburgh Fringe)

One-man shows are often confessional in nature, full of self-deprecating details and salacious revelations. Tom Moran takes that to a whole new level by dissecting his character in a live autopsy, ripping away the smiley mask to reveal the malignant traits that caused him to lose romantic friends, lose classmates, lose an organ, and lose self-respect from his childhood through to his twenties.

Tom Moran is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar begins with a near tsunami of information about his childhood, seeded with gags to get the audience giggling on his side. I’m somewhat jealous that he didn’t have to attend parent teacher meetings … though I shouldn’t complain as I think I only had to endure two during seven years of secondary education due to repeated reorganisation of which years needed them that meant my year group sailed through under the radar.

The crowd-pleasing is quickly established. His need for affirmation is demonstrated. The lengths to which young Tom would go to double down on untruths are almost Trumpian. The jovial bonhomie evaporates in the instant Moran steps aside from the warm rug and stool to stand behind a mic stand which features throughout the performance like a naked confessional box. Aoife Kavanagh’s sound design and Colin Doran’s effective lighting assist the transitions.

Soon we’ve jumped into his twenties and adult Tom is becoming more aware of his weaknesses. After a while I begin to wonder whether the show is a form of continuing therapy for the performer? Is this a carryover of the sessions with the perceptive Bronagh from Omagh (my real hero in the tale) who saw through the bull and bravado and poked her finger right into the sore at the heart of Tom’s malaise.

It turns out that the show title’s tense could be altered. Tom Moran’s was probably all those things … although the lying was the only issue that needed addressed. But over an hour, we’ve learned – and he’s reminded himself to the point of tears – why he deceived himself and others.

What began as a tale about a boy turns into a exposé about his mother, uncomfortable at first but then twisted into a celebration. Assuming it’s all true – a doubt that seems misplaced but a nearly inevitable legacy of the show’s title and content – there’s an exceptional level of honesty and openness.

There’s a great Wolf of Wallstreet gag, though the Madeline McCann quip is tonally off and would be best swept under the carpet. Davey Kelleher has done a good job shaping the storytelling and giving Moran places and gestures for each scene. The show’s short tour of Ireland ahead of performances throughout August in the Pleasance Courtyard at Edinburgh Fringe should smooth out the rhythm.

You can catch Tom Moran is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar at the Lyric Theatre until Wednesday 19 July. It’s in the Civic Theatre in Tallaght (Thursday 20–Saturday 22) before moving into the Pleasance Courtyard Below at Edinburgh Fringe (Wednesday 2–Monday 28 August).

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