Elf Lyons mixes humour and heartbreak, Frank Skinner works the crowd, Kristen Schaal returns with a secret – and one man sings the same song over and over again

No fringe festival has been complete in recent years without some oddball clown confection – usually animal-based – from the idiosyncratic Lyons. But this year’s offering promises something unusually personal, a reflection on a breakup she experienced while touring her last show.
Pleasance Courtyard, 5-31 August

The unsettling performance artist, who has made some electrifying stage shows in his time, is taking a leap into literature with an eye-opening book, In Pursuit of a Wonderful Nothing. A hard sell, he thinks

There are commercial strategies to promote your first book, and then there’s what Kim Noble planned. “I asked the publishers if I could hire a digger, then go to a roundabout, dig a massive hole and bury the books under the roundabout,” he tells me, deadpan over coffee. “They didn’t think it was a good idea.” You don’t say, Kim. This is a book that has been decades in the making, Noble reports – while his conversation makes clear why previous efforts came to naught. “Someone once approached me to write a book about a show I’d made. I started to do drawings for it. But I didn’t give them to the publisher, I left them around London in public toilets, so the publisher had to go out and search for them.

“And then,” he adds dolefully, “they decided to do another book instead.”

Glee Club, Glasgow
The masc lesbian comic from New York delivers a superb set with big laughs and twisty logic

Old-school standup celebrating the traditional masculine virtues? It’s fallen a little out of fashion. But it’s a different story when a masc lesbian comic delivers that material – a story of gleeful iconoclasm, big laughs and twisty gender logic. Ashley Gavin was a jobbing standup who blew up online during the pandemic, and whose output – including viral “crowd work” clips and the podcast We’re Having Gay Sex – has secured an ardent, largely queer fanbase. She’s like their best pal or big sis tonight, recounting how a woman who dresses like a teenaged wannabe car mechanic (and who – tongue firmly in cheek – considers more feminine women to be “a bunch of pussy-ass bitches”) came to be freezing her eggs.

The pleasure is in how Gavin lays siege to gender convention, with one routine after another scrambling the signifiers of what we expect men, women, or indeed masculine lesbians, to do and be. The opener finds “lesbian with a Brazilian” Gavin submitting herself to a waxing treatment. Elsewhere, the New Yorker ventures the argument – while savouring the discomfort it generates – that the clitoris is essentially a “tiny dick”. Later, she muses on penetration (might it not equally be seen as “envelopment”?) and contends that two “boy lesbians” hooking up with one another is “against God”.

The taboo-busting, Tony-award-winning show has returned. But how will its 00s attitudes land today? Will they still sing Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist and If You Were Gay?

There are certain problems you might expect when rehearsing a West End musical. Then there are the problems arising today, regarding the flaccidity of a prominent performer. “This one’s too floppy,” protests actor Noah Harrison, who is struggling with the choreography because his dance partner lacks backbone. No offence is taken, mind you: the culprit is made of felt. It’s time to swap out this cloth character for a sturdier one, and there are plenty to choose from. Row upon row of Sesame Street-alike puppets flank the room, each awaiting its moment in the spotlight.

This is Avenue Q, the Broadway-to-London hit, with songs by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, and book by Jeff Whitty, now revived to celebrate 20 years since its West End premiere. When it first launched, its mixture of multicoloured kids TV puppets, real-world problems (sex, racism, the housing crisis, existential drift) and outrageous songs felt truly out of the blue, and secured it Tony awards for best musical, best book and best score. But the young people to whom its story was addressed are now all grown up, and a new generation could benefit from the tale it has to tell.

They wowed the Edinburgh fringe with whip-smart sketches about Nasa engineers and what their audience were thinking. Now the slacker troupe are back on stage – but a long way from TV screens

When a “New York cult favourite sketch group” (as per the blurb) visits the UK, we may imagine we are getting the next big thing. But by the end of a transatlantic video call to three-quarters of the four-piece Simple Town, I am disabused of such naivety. “We meet sometimes with UK production companies,” says one of their number, Sam Lanier, “who see us and think: ‘These guys could be a great bridge to the American market.’ But what they don’t know is that no one fucks with us in America. All the people who work in development in American comedy already know about us, and they’ve all said ‘no’.”

“We don’t make a living doing Simple Town at all,” he adds. Reader, don’t let the status of Saturday Night Live – or recent Netflix hit I Think You Should Leave – fool you: sketch comedy isn’t a golden ticket in the US either. And Simple Town, such lovable debutants at the Edinburgh fringe last summer, are in the same boat as their UK counterparts: holding down day jobs, making films as well as live sketch, just about keeping their team-comedy show on the road. But “we really believe in it,” says Felipe Di Poi. “We believe the work we’ve done together is the best work any of us has done, that it’s way bigger than anything we could have made by ourselves.” You can deny them TV gigs, you can stymie their professional development, but – by all the collaborative gods! – you can’t keep a good sketch troupe down.

The master clown helped generations of performers be more alive in the moment – and not take themselves too seriously. His teachings were for life as well as the stage

• Philippe Gaulier, clown guru and mentor to theatre and comedy greats, dies aged 82

When I was starting out as a theatre-maker, back in the last millennium, there were three ways (or so we thought) you could educate yourself in the trade. If you wanted to be taken seriously and say a lot of words, drama school in the UK was your bag. If you wanted to make theatre with your body, École Jacques Lecoq in Paris beckoned. And if you wanted to perform with your whole heart, shared innocence and transcendent idiocy, you went to École Philippe Gaulier. That’s what my pal Alex Murdoch did, and she returned with a suite of his teachings (about clowning and so much more than clowning) that the two of us made theatre with for the next 17 years.

Few knew back then, although the process was already under way, that Gaulier – who has died aged 82 – would go on to become a bigger name in comedy than in theatre training. This was much to the great man’s disgust. “I hate standup comedy,” he growled at me when I interviewed him a decade ago. “I would never teach something so horrible.” And nor did he. But he did teach skills – of playfulness and alertness to a crowd; of being vividly alive in the moment; of celebrating your own ridiculousness – that made standups, sketch comics and clowns much better at their jobs. In his later years, “Gaulier-trained” became a must-have imprimatur for scores of comic acts, particularly those wishing to join in the thrilling boom in innovative clown-comedy that has lit up the circuit in recent times.

Brian Logan is the Guardian’s comedy critic and the artistic director of A Play, a Pie and a Pint

Darlington Hippodrome
Perkins’ return to live comedy features some lurid stories of her personal and professional ineptitude, and jaunty tales about vacuum cleaners and a drug-addled trip to a shaman

Shame is what Sue Perkins promises us in this return to live comedy after years away: her public personae withdrawn like the layers of a Russian doll to reveal the true, humiliated person beneath. Who wouldn’t want to see the former Bake Off star, after “30 years in our living rooms”, put on such a show? But it’s not quite what Perkins delivers. Like Dawn French before her, in a touring set purporting to show what a “huge twat” she was, The Eternal Shame of Sue Perkins compiles a series of perky professional and personal anecdotes only loosely connected to that theme, and is judicious with its intimacies.

It is stronger in its second half, which cleaves more tightly to the theme and affords more glimpses behind our host’s brisk demeanour. Act one begins with Perkins alluding to her shame at being middle-aged and tired in an industry dedicated to youthful vigour. The ensuing anecdotes have nothing to do with that whatsoever, as she relates an inconclusive tale about local drug dealers cloning her car registration, and a literal shaggy dog story, more suggestive of pride than shame, about rescuing a wounded pup on a trip to Bolivia.

The Londoner from Lagos wowed the fringe with a show about language, family and cross-cultural identity. She talks about dread, dreams and her bid for ‘controlled chaos’

Before her first Edinburgh fringe run last summer, Ayoade Bamgboye put a question to her comedy friends: “How do you debut?” She recalls their advice: “You introduce yourself, and there’s a point of view. There should also be a narrative arc. And you need to establish who you are as a comedian.” This was a lot to hear. “It filled me with dread,” says the 31-year-old. “There’s this recurring thought that you can only debut once. If it falls flat, then you’re just a shit debutante, forever.”

Reader, Bamgboye avoided this fate, and then some. A fringe first-timer with a very slender comedy CV behind her, the Londoner-via-Lagos arrived at the festival with a fresh-minted show, Swings and Roundabouts, and left clutching the prestigious best newcomer award, as formerly won by Harry Hill, Sarah Millican and Tim Minchin. (She was the first Black woman to win the award.) It’s a ticket to the big time and Bamgboye is still reeling. “These past months have been very difficult, getting out of my head and out of my own way. That question of: why me, why this, why now?” Sometimes, only a cliche will cover it. “It changed my life,” says Bamgboye flatly. “I hate to say stuff like that, but it did.”

Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner unite for Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Michael Sheen launches Welsh National Theatre and Bridget Christie revs up for a return to the stage

A new report suggests playwriting is in crisis after Covid, with producers retreating into safe old classics. Well, not from where I’m standing

Crisis? What crisis? British Theatre Before and After Covid, a report released this week, is like a comedy-tragedy mask rendered in academic form. If you look at it one way, you see smiles. Look at it another, you see only things to cry about. The media coverage of the report, by the British Theatre Consortium, focused on the latter, with industry bible the Stage reporting: “‘Sharp decline’ in new plays since Covid.” Between 2019 and 2023, the number of new plays produced dropped by almost 30%. If vindication was needed for much recent angsting about the condition of new writing in UK theatre, this report seems to provide it.

So is playwriting in crisis? I’m in a decent position to comment, at least insofar as that question applies in Scotland. I run A Play, a Pie and a Pint (PPP), the Glasgow theatre institution producing more new plays than any other theatre in … Europe? The world? The known universe? (We wait in vain for someone to tell us we’ve been trumped.) Based on our experience – fielding hundreds of scripts a year, producing and touring new plays every week, year-round – there is plenty to be concerned about. But there are also reasons for optimism, some evidenced by the report, which was written by director Dan Rebellato and playwright David Edgar.