Tim Harding's comedy diary

Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the comedy he's been watching in London recently: Krapp's Last Tape, Kiran Deol and Paul Black.

It’s an adage in stand-up circles that performers in the theatre get their laughs on easy mode – and certainly if you’re used to cutting-edge fringe comedy where comics find ways to subvert expectations every few seconds, it can be jarring to attend a play at the National and hear the audience go into hysterics over very basic – or sometimes extremely dated – material. 

But, of course, it’s kind of a feature of the theatre, isn’t it? Comedy famously ages like milk, so we should probably pity the directors and actors trying to amuse a modern audience with jokes that in some cases were written hundreds of years ago. Perhaps theatre audiences are unconsciously grading on this curve, but there’s also an art to making ancient lines feel fresh, and finding interesting ways to stage plays that gets the most of comic beats that share very little of our contemporary comedic sensibility.

Samuel Beckett is an interesting case, partly because the mordant absurdism in his plays ages better than most postwar comedies of manners. Like many of his works, 1958’s Krapp’s Last Tape, currently revived as a one-man show by Gary Oldman at the Royal Court, mines pathos and dark humour from the scenario of a lone man beset, Basil Fawlty style, by forces outside his control – in this case: age, corruption, irrelevance and memory. 

The play takes place entirely at a table with a tape player, as an elderly Krapp listens to a recording of himself at age 39, recounting the events from the previous year.

The other reason Beckett is interesting is that, notoriously, his estate exerts extremely tight control over productions of his work, rejecting permission for anything that even slightly deviates from Beckett’s explicit staging wishes. So, unlike some Shakespeare productions, there’s little in the way of interpretation or artistic licence to be had. Even an actor as great as Oldman ends up being subservient to the text, permitted slight modulations of his vocal tone and not much else. 

His most recognisable joke happens right at the beginning where, in classic bouffon fashion, he laboriously eats an entire banana in pindrop silence, then reaches into his pocket and produces… a second banana. It seems like an ad-lib until you read Beckett’s text, in which each beat is prescribed.

That doesn’t mean it’s not funny, of course. Oldman hits those beats with virtuosic skill, and it helps that Krapp – an unkempt old drunk in a stained shirt – is already Oldman’s fursona, a character he’s been wheeling out with increasing authenticity since Slow Horses. 

Stewart Lee once said that the funniest thing that could happen during the Edinburgh Fringe would be a tramp farting alone in the woods, and Krapp’s Last Tape is kind of the literary version of that, where instead of a fart it’s a bunch of stinking memories. Oldman can stink, sigh, grumble, cough and weep better than almost anyone.

Tears were conspicuous by their absence in Kiran Deol’s show Assault on Comedy at the Soho Theatre. This is the story of a random, brutal attack that was visited upon her outside a 7-Eleven in LA three years ago, but as a former serious documentary maker, she approaches this intense topic with an analytical, almost detached air. 

Deol is a naturalised LA denizen, and her comedic persona combines that superficialness with a kind of high-performance jaded misanthropy that reminded me of 90s Gen X comics like Janeane Garofalo. 

Her writing is not particularly funny, which hurts the show in its first half, but things get more interesting when Deol – within the narrative – is presented with a strange quirk of the Californian legal system: as the ‘victim’ (a word she hates) of the attack, she’s allowed to have some input into the fate of the perpetrator.

This sets the stage for an interesting mutation of the show, in which the one-woman narrative is opened up to the audience for a town hall discussion about restorative justice and the merits of punitive vs rehabilitative paths in sentencing. 

This particular audience was only small, but they took to the concept enthusiastically, and by the end of the night almost everyone had had their say. Again, there wasn’t a lot of laughing going on, but it was certainly stimulating, even if it provoked a little anxiety about just how many people in the room fell on the opposite side of the debate from me. 

You won’t find a full barrel of laughs here, but if you take a date then you’re liable to have an interesting discussion – both during and after the show.

Also at Soho, Glaswegian comic Paul Black is one of those acts who, without ever having crossed my desk, has built a substantial following through his online character comedy before moving into live stand-up.

 Cash Cow is his third live show, and has the feeling of an odds-and-ends collection. By the sounds of it, he spent his first two shows going through his context and backstory, and now we’re left with some remaining scattered memories of childhood, and his opinions on which Glasgow branch of Morrisons he could most easily live without. 

The lack of punchy material accentuates a potential issue posed by his relaxed, unshowy delivery. If the material is strong, it can speak for itself; if you’re trying to spin straw into gold, it would help to have a stronger grasp of theatricality. Otherwise, as is the case here, things start feeling pretty insubstantial.

Black on stage is mild-mannered, gently camp, and makes allusions to a reckless youth that seems to have evaporated, leaving behind a ‘been-there-done-that’ peevishness that peaks during a story about encountering an American at a backpacker hostel. 

The slight disdain that is his usual mode runs the risk of showing him to be a bit of a killjoy in this story, where he hits a lot of cliches in his search for comedy. In his retelling, Americans = loud, ukuleles = lame, Coldplay = boring. Tell me something I didn’t know! Deviate from the first, most obvious path a little! 

When he lets those inhibitions go, he finds some good stuff. He’s correctly intuited that recounting childhood trauma while vigorously salsa-dancing is a very funny idea, and wisely returns to it a couple of times, showing himself to be a nifty little mover in the process. With a few more moments like that, this show could have stood out from the pack a little more.

Published: 20 May 2026