At points in Jess Robinson’s show, as you’re being pinned to the back wall of the venue by the power of her balladeering, you think this should be happening 50 yards down the road, in a West End theatre. Big voice, big smile, big on pop culture: it couldn’t be more mainstream. And not for the want of trying. The show is called No Filter, and purports to introduce us to the real, no-holds-barred Robinson, emerging from behind the vocal impressions with which she made her name on Dead Ringers, Britain’s Got Talent and elsewhere.
One song, in the louche mockney style of Lily Allen, sends up Robinson’s eagerness to please. Another envies Nicki Minaj her sexual candour. But withdraw Robinson’s filter and – no spoiler this – she remains slick, smiley and squeaky clean. Yes, there’s a routine about teenage sexual initiation, but it couldn’t be more chaste and ends, delightfully, in a four-piece recorder version of Like a Virgin.
That was the show’s highlight and, not coincidentally, its most idiosyncratic moment. Elsewhere, Robinson and her perky band devise inventive new formats – Celebrity Phone Hack; the Wheel of Fortune-ish Celebrity Volleyball – to accommodate impersonations of everyone from Adele to Kim Kardashian, Janis Joplin (or is it Marge Simpson?) to Billie Holiday. They’re often tenuous – her Six Degrees of Theresa May game reveals more about Robinson’s voice than the PM’s – but often impressive, as with the closing song, each line sung by a different, instantly recognisable celeb.
Robinson’s talent for singing and mimicry, if less so for jokes, fills the room fit to burst. What the supposed removal of her filter achieves isn’t quite so clear.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 8 June; then at Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 1-24 August.
