Tim Harding's comedy diary

Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the comedy he's been watching in London recently: Mothman: A Romance Musical, Cabaret Impedimenta, Lawrence Dodd and Harriet Richardson.

The Brighton Fringe can sometimes feel like a bit of an uphill struggle for comedy connoisseurs. Brighton is a city of many charms of course, but the Fringe’s main complex of venues, the Spiegelgardens, are located essentially on a roundabout in the city centre, and the open-air beer garden has become a kind of ersatz nightclub for the city’s teenagers, to the extent that it sometimes feels like the comedy is struggling to make itself heard.

More importantly though, the festival has excellent programming, making it a great place to catch work in progress in advance of Edinburgh. I only managed to make it down for a couple of days this year, but my clear standout was Mothman: A Romance Musical, a bonkers full-scale narrative sketch musical about cryptid-hunting teenagers finding a little more than they bargained for while wandering the woods of West Virginia.

The show is written and performed by Alex Franklin and Nikola McMurtrie, two very exciting up-and-coming acts, with musical comedian Alex Prescot and sketch lynchpin Hudson Hughes rounding out the cast. 

At least in this early iteration, it has the knockabout feel of a side project thrown together by a bunch of mates, but that belies the amount of work that’s clearly gone into it. I’ve never seen a McMurtrie segment where she’s given less than 150  per cent to the design, and that applies here across the whole of the show – this thing is, if not exactly tight, still bursting at the seams with gags, goofs, and good songs. 

Franklin and Prescot bring a lot of charisma to their ostensible lead roles, while Hughes is a revelation, very funny playing a different character every time he walks on stage. I’ve not always fully clicked with his self-penned stuff, but he makes a very valuable supporting player here. If they get the attention they deserve, Mothman should be a calling card for all four of them.

Half an hour later, I was afforded the chance to catch a long-running John Luke Roberts side project, Cabaret Impedimenta. Roberts travels the country with a veritable harem of formats in tow, so you’d be forgiven for not knowing this one, but the idea is that non-comedic cabaret performers are asked to perform their sets while being compromised in real time by ‘impediments’ – usually Gaulier sketch comedians trialling a half-formed character. 

Sometimes those elements interact productively: it was a hoot watching Danny Lee Grew try to perform close-up magic while handcuffed to a bellowing Luke Rollason as Inspector Javert from Les Mis. Others were less successful. Laila Woozeer performed her torch songs largely unruffled by one of the Bye sisters as a Victorian ghost, who couldn’t find much to do other than run around and wail, and the clown Enrico Touche pretty much came to a dead stop as soon as Benjamin Alborough entered as Terry Wogan. 

This inconsistency makes for an unsatisfying show, but interestingly it does catalyse a desire to see the cabaret performers doing their thing unimpeded, so it functions as a good showcase for them at least.

Back in London but still mired in clown territory, Lawrence Dodd was playing Soho Theatre for one night as part of the London Clown Festival, with his show This Can’t Be It. 

As he bursts into the room with wild hair, sunglasses and tiny shorts, hyping up the audience, telling us that ‘people CHANGE after my stuff’, one thing is obvious from the very beginning: he’s going to be taking his clothes off before the hour is out. Proceeding directly from this slightly numbing revelation, you work out what kind of comedian he is: combining pinball energy with a thousand yard existential stare.

It’s a formula that was crystallised for me by Rob Copland, whose 2024 show this strongly resembles. Equal parts agitated and self-aggrandising in character, Dodd rampages around the room, pulling the audience into his spiral of confusion. He holds the stage very well, and often finds funny and interesting things to do. 

It’s particularly affecting when he throws open the curtains of the Soho Upstairs room to let the outside world in, seemingly dazzled or pained by the early evening light of reality. What he lacks though is Copland’s underpinning of stand-up chops – without that observational tightness his show develops the clown’s tendency to drift between coordinates, as in each semi-improvised section he runs out of things to do rather than building towards a point. Diverting as it is, by the time his clothes come off you’re ready for him to conclude his enquiries into the human condition.

Lastly, I caught a WIP performance of Creep by Harriet Richardson at the Bill Murray. Richardson is avowedly not a comedian, but made her name as a performance artist and essayist, and has received media attention for many of her stunts. 

You may know her as the girl who went on a hundred dates in 24 hours, or the girl who got a tattoo of each of her lovers’ mother’s names. For her transition into live performance, she’s made a breezily unhinged chronicle of this media attention, the kind of trouble you can get into from being terminally online, and the strange things that happen when your online persona intersects with the real world. 

Special attention is paid to an obsession she developed with a Taskmaster-level comedian from whom she received an unsolicited dick pic, incidentally providing hours of fun for any UK comedy industry follower who wants to use context clues to figure out the correspondent’s identity.

The show as it stands leans heavily into comment-farming, i.e. delving into the online comments about her work to generate material. That will probably balance out a little as she develops her persona as a live performer, although she already seems relaxed and confident.

 The good news is that Creep is already very, very funny, and wonderfully structured. Richardson has a real knack for following the comedic leads generated by her art, setting up all kinds of satisfying escalations, twists and turns in her narrative, and converting chance asides into hilarious and emotional payoffs at the rate of a Max & Ivan show. 

This was very exciting to see in its early stages – be prepared to hear a lot more about this show.

• Both  Mothman: A Romance Musical and John-Luke Roberts are taking part in Chortle’s Fast ​Fringe showcase at the Pleasance in London on July 13. Tickets.

Published: 17 Jun 2026