It’s not often that a play combines gags about anything and everything from food poisoning to dildos with one of the most significant political movements of the twenty-first century. Queen of the Nile, with its onslaught of jokes coming thick and fast and its setting amidst the Arab Spring, is certainly the first I’ve seen to tackle such a tricky dichotomy.

Tim Fountain’s new play at Hull Truck departs quickly from the rain-battered windows of a Wakefield flat in favour of sunnier Egyptian shores; we’re off to a promising start as Lizzie Roper’s Debbie swaps flipping burgers for the bright lights and cultural delights of Luxor. In these early scenes, the comedy of Debbie’s lacklustre life in England and the cringeworthy habits of Brits abroad is well-observed and quite pacey. By turns stroppy, deflated, excitable and fun, Roper brings colour to 40-year-old Debbie as it soon becomes clear she is not so interested in the Pyramids or sailing down the Nile as she is boozing it up and taking trips to Banana Island.

“Banana Island” is just one of a multitude of innuendo-laden gags, often from the mouth of self-confessed “queen” Mr Lesley, played by Dudley Sutton. He voices a plethora of the play’s “things you can’t say” and luxuriates in his character’s taste for speaking frankly, crudely and lewdly. Sutton works hard to bridge the gap between this levity and the underlying motives of a connivingly persuasive character and there is an interesting invitation here to consider what lies beneath the surface, as the tone shifts towards something darker and more sinister.

And the tone certainly does shift. Throughout the play, each scene is intercut with a clever use of projection that establishes context and keeps us up-to-date with the developments of the oncoming revolution. But there is a dilemma here, as the characters seem oddly unaffected by this life-changing political movement in the Middle East. Perhaps this is a comment on the blindness of the characters, so wrapped up in their own problems that they can’t see the bigger picture like we, the audience, can. Yet the comedy begins to sit uneasily alongside the sounds of bombing and guns in the distance, giving rise to questions of whether this is a comedy about a woman falling for a man too young for her, or a political commentary designed to make its audience feel uneasy and ask difficult questions about the role of tourism and expatriots in this area.

There’s no denying there are laughs to be had here, but amidst the dildos and bananas, the best are moments of wittier word play, delivered brilliantly by the cast. There are one-liners aplenty throughout, but it is perhaps Roper’s raucous declaration that her relationship with Mahmoud is not “friction” but “fact” that raised one of the biggest belly laughs of the night. Mention must be made of Michelle Butterly, playing Debbie’s gym bunny best friend Jan to perfection, as well as the brilliant Asif Khan who offers the most emotionally complex and assured performance of the play as Mahmoud.

With an effective design and a strong cast of four, if Queen of the Nile feels slightly inharmonious in tone and theme, this doesn’t detract from the laughs in the auditorium — not to mention gasps, if the press night audience is anything to go by.

Queen of the Nile is playing at Hull Truck Theatre until 11 May. For tickets and more information see the Hull Truck website.

Image credit: Hull Truck Theatre

Live music, magic tricks, singing, dancing and interval entertainment. Things which, in combination, made up a lively night at a music hall in the Victorian era and – quite aptly for a detective working in the late 1800s – that come together to create a rowdy night out in The Revenge of Sherlock Holmes. Transported back to the late 1800s, the audience was treated to an intimate, hilarious performance of a play which tells the story of Sherlock Holmes’s return from the Reichenbach falls, and his readjustment to a boring society without his arch nemesis, Professor Moriarty.

Introduced by the brilliant Dr. Watson – played here by John Cusworth – we are led through an adventure with chases through London, which takes on the high spirits of the music hall era with a somewhat frenetic pace that is held together by the fantastic band which accompanies the cast – and what a cast this is. With a pedigree which names at least six West-End musicals, the cast has an impressive history – and it shows in their performances. Holmes, played by Tim Walton, is especially fantastic, encapsulating the traditional, sharp demeanour of the detective, whilst also revealing his softer side as he faces the beautiful Bella Spellgrove (Leonie Heath). Soon finding himself in deep water, however, it’s up to Dr. Watson, Inspector Lestrade and the Baker Street Irregulars to save the day.

Though the story and the singing are exactly what one would come to expect from a cast with a background as broad and exciting as those in The Revenge of Sherlock Holmes, one can’t help but notice that on some levels, this performance didn’t quite sit right. Hollow staging meant that some of the ensemble song-and-dance routines were drowned out by the heavy footfalls of a cast happily leaping around, and occasionally the entrances and exits of the cast were so awkwardly executed that some of the surprises were spoiled. Bearing in mind, however, that this was a tongue-in-cheek production, full of nods to the audience, naughty jokes and bubbling enthusiasm, these flaws fell by the wayside as a wave of energy swept us along. Luke Fredericks and Nathan Jarvis, as Director and Musical Director respectively, have done a wonderful job to fill the small space of Hoxton Hall with laughter and song, perfectly balancing a comic self-awareness with the sincere desire to see a job well done.

In an age where Sherlock Holmes is in almost every direction you look, it’s somewhat nice to see a return to the stories in their original Victorian setting, with corsets, petticoats and top hats. Though the production needs polishing, which will likely come further into the run, for such a fresh idea – to adapt the play to the space, rather than attempting the opposite – The Revenge of Sherlock Holmes is a hugely exciting piece.

The Revenge of Sherlock Holmes is playing at Hoxton Hall until 10 May 2013. For more information and tickets, see Morphic Graffiti’s website.

I have a confession to make: a few years ago, I flirted with stand-up comedy. Theatremaking is collaboration; I love that in the job, but part of me was ready to speak in my voice for a while, unmediated.

I had a few routines I was proud of – I remember one about Sigmund Freud publishing his Oedipus theory and going home for family Christmas to find that his dad has hidden all the knives and forks for fear of being killed, so the family eats their turkey with plastic cutlery. It always got laughs: it had defined characters and a tight structure, but after performing it even five times, I was bored. Beyond the mechanics of the joke and the fun of riding its rhythm, there was little going on under the surface.

In one of his more grandiose moments, the late Steve Jobs said that, whatever we put our minds to, we should mean to “put a dent in the universe”. I stopped doing stand-up is because ultimately I had little to say through comedy about the world.  Even if the audience laughed, all I could manage was a shrug. The comedian Daniel Kitson has talked about this on stage. In his 2006 show, Weltanschauung, he says that if an audience laughs for the wrong reasons, such as taking a piece of irony at face value, then its laughter is “as piercing to him as thrown fruit”.

I saw Kitson a couple of weeks ago at Battersea Arts Centre, workshopping a new set, After the Beginning, Before the End. He starts an international tour in a few weeks’ time, and last month he junked the entire set he’d been working on. On stage, he sat at a desk and read from notes. Parts of the show had an assured rhythm, other parts were tentative. A few times he repeated bits, playing with the composition of individual sentences, trying to find “the comedic key to a locked door”. At the end, he talked about what he wants the show to be, and what it isn’t yet. I can’t say any more about that because he asked the audience not to, but he wanted his show to be more than just gags. He wanted to find the danger again. On his website, he goes into more detail: “I’ve been waiting to have the idea for this show for weeks, for months. A space held open in my head waiting for the idea. For months. I’ve done previews and I’ve booked the tour and I’ve stared at the internet and I’ve made chicken and I’ve tried not to worry. But the idea has not come and I have worried. I’ve worried and doubted and waited more and more and more. But then today, having dropped my dad off at the train station and met my friends for some coffee, whilst driving home to write this (very overdue) brochure copy – dreading the thought of heaving half lies and optimistic promises into something vaguely intriguing but not developmentally restrictive – halfway home, it happened. Somewhere between East London and South London – It arrived. The Idea. Just like that. Like a child, late home from school, oblivious to the worry and the panic and the phone calls. It just walked in and sat down like it wasn’t even a big deal. So now I’m typing this in my bedroom because the boy who lives next door is playing the James Bond theme on what I assume to be a trumpet. And you have to trust me. Two hours ago I didn’t have the idea. Now I do. And it’s going to be good.”

I’m fascinated by this idea of the turn in the road, the moment that you commit as an artist to putting yourself in danger every time you make something, and not putting anything into the world that you don’t love or that hasn’t scared you.

In a few weeks, I’m seeing another comedian I admire, Louis CK, perform in London. After years of stringing together jokes about tourists and the weather, the second stage of his career has been one of the most remarkable in the history of stand-up comedy. Each year, CK writes and tours an 80-minute set, and at the end of the year, he records it, releases it on his website for $5, and retires the entire set, except for its strongest joke, which he’ll use to start next year’s set, so that everything that follows has to be even better. Explaining his approach a few years ago, CK said that, for him: “…the goal of comedy is to just laugh, which is a really high-hearted thing, [a] visceral connection and reaction. And any time I take laughs away… I have to replace it with something at least that high… it can’t just be interesting. It has to be ‘holy shit!’ one way or the other: ‘holy shit, that’s funny!’ or ‘holy shit, that kind of scared me’. I’ve been interested in scaring people too because it sort of runs by some of the same rules as laughing. Or ‘oh my God, I really feel that’. Or ‘what the fuck is this? I don’t understand this’. These are all heightened responses and I have to be getting one of those.”

Watching Daniel Kitson perform stand-up is the reason Johnny Vegas stopped performing. And watching Louis CK, I realise that I wrote maybe one joke that came close to what he’s talking about. In many ways, a life in the theatre is an insane choice for an adult to make. Humans have always told stories, but there are faster ways to respond to the world than writing and rehearsing a play, mediums that reach wider audiences and economic models that make more sense.

You can’t know what artistic directors want: there are always trends and ‘me too’ productions, but what anyone really wants is to be blown away by something new, and there’s no map for that. The only way to make that dent is to accept that you’re rolling the dice with your career and go all in: scare yourself.

If you’re going to go down, it will have been fighting.

Image: Felipe Avello Presenta

As Leslie Jordan’s latest comedy routine begins, the big question that can seemingly only be answered through one man’s anecdotal reflections is, “Do gay men really become their mothers?” While Jordan does his very best to describe how his mother supported him as he turned his sexuality into a dominant personality trait, Mama’s absence from the stage makes it hard to tell if the maternal transformation is complete. One thing’s for certain, though: as Jordan invites us into a space so full of personal stories it could be considered domestic despite its 420 seat capacity, the grown-up son no longer needs his mommy to generate embarrassment as he takes us through his own back-catalogue of baby photos.

Although in his late fifties, with his diminutive height and wealth of superlatives, Jordan has a childlike energy in both stature and speech. It is with such vitality that our camp Hollywood actor takes us back to the Tennessee of the 1960s. Here, we meet the little boy who, when discovering that his pretty, blonde twin sisters were commandeering far more than their fair share of attention, devoted himself to a life of flamboyance.

At times this performance seems ruinously over-directed. When imagining the day of his father’s funeral, Jordan solemnly turns his back to his audience, miming the actions of a newly-widowed mother as she explains a very difficult subject to her three young children. Mama’s channelled explanations are briskly severed as gunshots and brass solos take us to Jordan’s memory of a military funeral. Sadly, valid ways of acknowledging a deeply affecting memory sit uncomfortably on stage, clouding the emotion that no doubt lies behind this significant inclusion.

When Jordan calms his style, skipping across the stage and holding back our laughter with one raised palm and a whole mountain of false modesty, his sickly sweet sincerity gets a warm reception. Some snapshots of mother bear a more relaxed and genuine sensitivity and sometimes, when Jordan unleashes his infectious laugh, you can see why so many fall for his camp charm. Occasionally, he pulls off witticisms that could’ve been ripped straight out of a joke book with winning authenticity; mother’s devout background and dependence upon men draw laughs as, when asked for her prefered denomination when purchasing travellers’ cheques, she swiftly replies “Baptist”.

True, there are moments of tenderness here. Powering through a routine peppered with the Tennessee vernacular, and claiming local expressions and in-jokes as his own, Jordan speaks favourably of the Southern women who fashioned a protective bubble around the little boy who chose to play with dolls. The love story that emerges between Jordan’s mom and dad is a delight when unravelled, especially as our comic articulates the little class differences that existed between the couple: her envisioning a canopy as something to place above the bed; him, imagining it tucked just below the frame, with Jordan stressing the syllables with a vulgar drawl. Can. O. Pee.

After such romance is nostalgically portrayed, Jordan fasts forward to his own youth, a period defined by a joyful, rebellious hedonism, and charged by “feminine yearning” and daydreams about the night before. There’s more than one kind of spirit present as our actor tells relatable tales of teenage nights spent sneaking out of the family house, and the narrative is strong when it settles in a speakeasy, the only place where a 17-year-old transvestite and his three pals could get a measure of hooch early on a 1970s morning.

While the image of a drunk, overweight bar manager encouraging our reserved, Caucasian teen to take to the stage to perform Tina Turner paints a charming image of a welcoming community, Jordan’s show is less inclusive. Those who find it easy to guffaw at tales of a 13-year-old contracting gonorrhea on a boys’ choir coach trip may see Jordan as a treasure; others, who perhaps believe that women were put on this earth for far better reasons than to inspire drag characters, function as ‘fruit flies’ who associate with gay men or take on marginalised lesbian stereotypes, Jordan is infuriating and excessively self indulgent. Perhaps I wasn’t the target audience here, but unfortunately the story that I found easiest to relate to was that of a mother who, for psychosomatic reasons, could not keep her eyes open. By this point in a tale that was both over-familiar and unfamiliar, neither could I.

Fruit Fly is playing at Leicester Square Theatre until 16 March. For more information and tickets, see the Leicester Square Theatre website.