Three years on from his comedy award win for Ends Ahir Shah has crafted another verbose and emotional hour that twists the historical, the personal and the political into an airtight knot, catering well to the narrative complexity heads but leaving little room for laughter or spontaneity.
Of the many topics he pulls together here, two stand out. One is the idea that, when you emigrate, you have the opportunity to take some things with you and leave other things behind. Specifically, he means the Indian caste system, which entered his life belatedly at school in London, when a friend asked what caste he was, and he realised he didn’t know.
The other is struggle – his parents’ struggle to raise and educate him in a way that honoured at least two cultures, while having to work three jobs to stay afloat (despite his opulent speaking voice, he grew up working class); and his own mental health struggles now, an ambient tension or despair that he contrasts comically with his wife’s total adaptation to modern life.
Ageing into his mid-thirties, Shah is giving freer rein to the reactionary uncle inside him, grumbling particularly about how easy the kids have it these days. The funniest line in the whole show concerns his opinion of the majority of his colleagues, whose champagne socialist politics he has little time for.
It’s a funny line because it’s one of the few moments in the show where he has knives out and a glint in his eye; the rest of it is so unfailingly studied and self-serious that you can feel both comic and audience being compressed under the weight of expectation. The energy, speed and agitation that are the hallmarks of his performance style are still there, but feel like calculated attempts to whip an insensate horse.
Interestingly, he describes himself as a 'normie' at the top of the show, and that’s half the problem with Golden: it’s a normie idea of what an award-winning comedy show looks like in 2026.
Later on, he talks about his lifetime high score for the depression test, and the fact that he got a higher autism score than Pierre Novellie but doesn’t want to bang on about it – and at that point you get a glimpse of the possibility that he’s not such a normie after all. If we're lucky, this technically admirable but stifling experience may one day be interpreted as his last attempt to keep his freak on the leash.
