Review of Sardinian performer's theatrical showcase

There’s quite some firepower behind Mattia Sedda. He’s trained with the likes of Philippe Gaulier, Viggo Venn, Red Bastard creator Eric Davis, the National Youth Theatre, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and the Fontainebleau Acting School in France. And this debut show is directed by Aitor Basauri, co-founder of physical comedy pioneers Spymonkey.

In fact, it might even be too much training, as  Choin struggles to break free of stage school sensibilities. 

The whole premise of this show is thespian. He wants to be a great actor, so offers us his versions of the likes of Hamlet, Batman or Obi Wan Kenobi from Star Wars, ‘not the silly one with Ewan McGregor but the one with Alec Guinness’.

This line causes such gales of laughter at London’s Museum of Comedy, where it’s landed after an Edinburgh run last year, you would think it the greatest joke ever written, not just a mildly amusing thowaway. The audience seems so madly partisan that as a disinterested punter I felt like an outsider missing a huge in-joke as the crowd  – who mostly seem to know each other – laugh implausibly hard and loudly at the smallest thing. Stage-school buddies, perhaps?

Anyway, Choin is a very loose dramatisation of Sedda’s real story of coming to London to make it as an actor – hence all that training – and takes its title from the call pig farmers use back home in Sardinia.

His attempts to take on great dramatic roles are sweetly amusing, especially when delivered in his thick accent, and occasionally slip into utter nonsense, made charming by his rural naivety. 

But while that would suggest a lack of guile, some of the sketches seem like drama school exercises, prowling the stage like a dinosaur, for example. Meanwhile, the joke of him ranting and raving like Mussolini is trying and failing to suppress a Nazi salute, exactly as Peter Sellers did in Doctor Strangelove. 

Choin is good-natured and mildly silly – but it all seems very slight… a feeling confirmed when he leaves the stage 30 minutes into a show advertised as 50, a performance way too short to be worth leaving the house for. This doesn’t feel like the project that will be his much-sought-after breakthrough… though you might cast him if you’re seeking a benign, affable idiot.

Review date: 30 May 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Museum Of Comedy