Brighton Fringe comedy review

Julia Knight has spent a couple of years touring the tribute act/one-woman play I Am Not Victoria Wood, but without the late, great comedian’s genius to depend upon, the limits of her own, far more tepid, output is exposed.

She rolls out a couple of Wood classics in this anthology – the melancholy-tinged 14 Again and the spiky commentary on weight-loss programmes Don’t Get Cocky – but they only serve to emphasise the superficiality of Knight’s numbers.

The opener, for example, rewrites the lyrics to Oklahoma! to be about Avocado!. Another, her own composition this time, complains about the constant requests to rate and review every transaction by feedback-hungry corporations.

As suggested by the title Songs Of Joy & Justice, she has aspirations towards protest singing, but the messages are often relatively trite. In a ‘billionaire’s medley’ of rewritten Queen songs, for example, she sings ‘I want to be tax-free’ to I Want To Break Free and ‘I want to fly my private jet’ to Bicycle Race, demonstrating her direct, cursory, approach to the subject matter. 

She’s not without social conscience as an atypically sincere shanty about the lot of a delivery driver in the gig economy – as inspired by a Ken Loach film –  proves. Another earnest moment has her performing The Fife Laird, a Scots dialect poem by Carolina Oliphant, a contemporary of Robert Burns to reflect the fact that Knight has recently moved to that Scottish kingdom. 

Other tracks aim for the whimsical, such as one inspired by the research that grudge-bearing crows remember human faces for years. But again its straightforward approach offers no surprises given she explains the story in the set-up, jolly as the ditty is.

Her take on Richard III, inspired by playing the Leicester Comedy Festival, is to directly offer statements challenging the Shakespearean propaganda to the tune of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.  (And her alto register doesn’t suit bluesier songs like this, and the Taxation Blues).

While the material errs on the side of twee, Knight delivers with an engaging jauntiness, happy to be on stage singing and wanting to spread that delight to the room. Her heart’s in the right place, and if you can overlook the simplistic lyrics and the ease of penning lyric-swap parodies – quite a big ‘if’, admittedly –  she serves up a gently cheery hour.

Review date: 6 May 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Brighton The Actors