Isy Suttie: The Actual One, on tour
For years, Isy Suttie was one of the London circuit’s hidden treasures – an unassuming, occasionally guitar-wielding comic offering gentle but wonderfully crafted stories about her idiosyncratic upbringing in Matlock. Then she got an unexpected break with a part in Peep Show, in which she played offbeat love interest Dobby. Now she has the task of introducing her own established comic voice to new audiences, who’ll be more familiar with the sight of her repeatedly breaking Mark Corrigan’s heart than telling jokes. The Actual One ties in with the newly published book of the same name (her first) and tells a typically low-key but properly amusing story. It’s a tale of a delayed rite of passage that’s becoming increasingly common: finding you’ve turned 30, and deciding this is probably the point where you should start becoming an adult. Involving tales of twentysomething drunkenness, a mad scramble to find a boyfriend, and ultimately a baby, it’s a highly personal account with a universal resonance.
Norden Farm Centre For The Arts, Sun; touring to 19 Feb
Ivo Graham: No Filter, London
It’s not possible for Ivo Graham to pass himself off as a member of the working classes. A product of Eton and Oxford, he’s a child of privilege with the genteel manner to match. But, while wealth has its advantages, it can’t buy you comic ability – and Graham has plenty of that. Like a number of other well-to-do comics, he’s able to make you believe that a posh background is a handicap rather than an asset. His latest show is jam-packed with jokes and stories about how his moneyed upbringing has left him totally unable to deal with the mundanities of everyday life, especially when this boys’ boarding school alumnus finds himself dealing for the first time with (gosh!) a woman. His fish-out-of-water status gives him a lot in common with those comedians who come to the UK from overseas and spin gags out of their befuddlement at our way of life. If Graham is to be believed, the posh world really is another country, and they truly do things differently there.
Queen’s Head, W1, Sun; Soho Theatre: Upstairs, W1, Mon to 23 Jan
Tiff Stevenson: Mad Man, on tour
Tiff Stevenson isn’t your typical crusading polemicist. Up until now, her stock-in-trade has been down-to-earth comic confessionals: she’s the kind of stand-up who’s willing to share details of her drunken misdemeanours and personal embarrassments. But these days, she’s increasingly happy to challenge audiences, and discuss subjects she cares passionately about. In this show, that means publicly signing up to the cause of feminism and challenging both the dominance of blokes, and the way society views and talks about women. Rather than trotting out over-familiar arguments, Stevenson finds fresh takes on the issue drawn from personal experience, whether as a consumer seduced by beauty myths or as a potentially quota-filling booking on a TV panel show.
Norden Farm Centre For The Arts, Maidenhead, Thu; The Junction, Cambridge Fri; touring to 27 Apr
