Tim Harding's comedy diary

Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the comedy he's been watching in London.

One of my favourite things about following an act throughout their career is being able to tell when they start getting a little restless. It’s always rewarding when you think you have someone’s modes and habits figured out, but then they start to express themselves in new ways.

I’ve seen every Rob Auton show for the last seven years, and seen him gradually refine his deliberate, whimsical, poetic style. Having achieved that – and it’s a great achievement – it’s exciting to see him shake up the rubric of what a Rob Auton show can be, with his latest hour Can.

Here, Auton explicitly plays a character for the first time, portraying the lead role in a narrative about a man called Can, supposedly the world’s greatest motivational speaker, now retired. 

With his hopeful, inspiring outlook, and his regular entreaties to experience the wonders that life has to offer, Auton has always had something of the motivational speaker about him anyway, and this narrative allows him to bend his own form, introducing music, lighting changes, time jumps and more stage mobility while still keeping the quizzical, stargazy one-liners (‘jellyfish have done well to get the word fish in their name’) that have always been his stock in trade.

For my money, while I’m pleased to see him innovating in his space, more experimentation is needed with his new theatrical elements to truly synergise them with his stand-up. As the world gets worse, Auton’s positivity has become a more challenging proposition to absorb, which is something he grapples with a little in this show. 

As he’s become more explicit about the emotional effect he hopes to achieve, he takes on the tone of a proselytiser, and his work can take on a good-natured but haranguing quality. Earlier shows were able to demonstrate the everyday wonders of life rather than directly insist that you experience them. His comedy is good enough to make you see stars without battering you over the head with them.

Also at the Soho Theatre, Australian clown Jessica Barton brought her newcomer-nominated Dirty Work, achieving with almost no words what Auton sets out to do with many. A Chaplinesque masterclass in physicality, geared towards pure charm, Dirty Work is an hour in the company of Barton’s legally distinct character Mary Floppins, a light-footed homemaker grappling magically with a cluttered and dirty stage.

Much of the joy of Barton’s performance is in her interaction with the men she drags up on stage to help with the housework. Refreshingly as a clown, she doesn’t automatically assume a position of power over her participants, which leads to the jokes feeling more collaborative, and less like tricks played on stooges. 

The subtle interrogation of cleaning as ‘women’s work’ and the obvious ways that Floppins struggles to balance her needs with her ostensible duties forms a constant background hum to the hour, only occasionally rising in pitch to make itself known, but lends the preternatural lightness of the confection some savoury depth. 

My only note of condemnation was for the audience on the night I saw it, especially the front row, who could frankly have helped a little more with the housework.

Over at the Pen Theatre they’ve been running a very interesting season of work-in-progress shows, and no actually it’s not exclusively ‘weird clown stuff’ as my editor suggests, although there’s definitely some of that too. 

Tilly Fletcher’s show Television is an odd freeform sketch animal that combines character comedy with observational and storytelling stand-up, recounting and reliving a youth misspent in front of the tiny grey TV/VCR in her bedroom. In the span of an hour she’s a gameshow floor manager, a bubbly kids’ TV presenter, a coke-addled Esther Rantzen-alike and so forth, sketches which are interspersed with scenes from her childhood and often underpinned by queasy trip-hop that betrays her strong Blue Jam influence.

It’s all part of the ‘persistent sense of overwhelming unreality’ that Fletcher thinks is the inevitable byproduct of juvenile TV consumption and the way we all mediate our lives through screens. If that all sounds a bit conceptual, she also has strong, joke-dense writing, and the switching between different comedic forms is worn very naturally.

Lastly, Maya Ricote proved that she can sustain her impact over a full hour with her new WIP. Her very silly persona Rosa Milano Paris Nueva-York is still a Latina actress with, shall we say, unusual physical dimensions, but the portrayal has actually changed a great deal since I last saw her perform at Gutter Royale.

Instead of a sultry world-weary diva she’s now more of an ingenue, albeit with a complicated backstory where she’s 96 years old and unfrozen from cryosleep. What remains is her great natural chops for physical comedy – she’s just a charismatic delight to watch on stage, leveraging the same funny bones as her sister Lara, but via body language instead of speech. 

As broad and as strange as this character and her story are, it interestingly has the ring of emotional truth – you can feel Ricote turning the dial on the outsized affect and melodrama of her previous work as a telenovella actress to turn herself clownish. It's less of a leap than you might expect. I predict big things, if you don’t mind my saying.

Published: 3 Feb 2026