Nina Conti, Stratford-upon-Avon
It’s easy to be a bit sneery about ventriloquists – especially if you’re scarred by childhood memories of Keith Harris and Orville – but Nina Conti has got a vote of confidence from no less august an institution than the RSC, whose main theatre she plays this week. Actually, Conti used to be a member of the RSC cast – so she hasn’t just spent the last 20 years anxiously repeating the phrase “gottle o’ geer” until her lips stop moving. While she’s very good at her craft, the real attraction with Conti is the joyfully subversive nature of her humour. The set-up of a ventriloquist arguing with their dummy is as old as the hills, but she manages to weave fresh, funny and emotionally complex relationships with her puppets – relationships full of mutual exploitation, passive aggression and the occasional moment of latent threat.
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Sun
Harry Hill, Portsmouth
Harry Hill’s unlikely transformation from culty stand-up to Saturday night superstar is continuing on screen with Stars in Their Eyes. Like all his best ITV work, it shows how a staid entertainment format can fall gloriously apart when bombarded with Hill’s particular brand of lunacy. Sure, not everything comes off, but in a TV landscape of carefully contrived sameyness, it’s a joy that someone is allowed to try something truly different. Away from TV, Hill’s live work is as good as ever. It would be easy for him to coast on his mainstream fame but he keeps coming up with bold and inventive ways of presenting comedy (on his last tour, involving a humongous inflatable sausage) and blistering, off-the-wall gags. This week, he’s appearing in Portsmouth at a Parkinson’s UK benefit alongside Tim Vine and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s Neil Innes.
The Guildhall, Portsmouth, Wed
Dan Baptiste, London
A lot of people have already fingered Dane Baptiste as a potential next big thing, including agents, producers and the Edinburgh comedy award panel, who shortlisted him for best newcomer at last summer’s fringe. And they’re unlikely to be wrong – Baptiste is a thunderingly charismatic comic with a burgeoning observational eye. Where many comedians his age resort to quick, glib gags, he has a flair for gently applied but utterly remorseless logic. He’ll take up an unexpected position and force you to follow him, not beating you over the head with his intellect but slowly pressing you into submission with laughter. Citizen Dane, his debut show, is ostensibly about questions of identity, and what it means to be the child of Grenadan immigrants in 21st-century Britain. But that makes it sound impossibly worthy, when it’s really a compelling introduction to a talent fast on the rise.
Top Secret Comedy Club, WC2, Sun; Soho Theatre, W1, Mon to 31 Jan
