Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

How do you get reviewers to come to your Edinburgh Fringe show? You make it all about them, obviously.

This one-man cod-horror show is a revenge fantasy inspired by the heartless critic who had the audacity to give Andrew Doherty a three-star review for Sad Gay AIDS Play, the spoof he brought to last year’s Fringe.

The villain of this follow-up story is the journalist Felix Chatelier, a vain, cocaine-snorting, privileged, out-of-touch, friendless, no-talent loser nepo baby – a failed playwright who knows nothing of theatre and cares even less about the creative geniuses he crushes with his casual insults and pathological inability to award five stars.

Flattery lures him away from his metropolitan elite London bubble to be ‘head reviewer’ at a drama festival in Loughborough, a sinister backwater where simple locals, suspicious of outsiders,  trade stories of mysterious dark forces.

With the sort of high camp that makes pantomime look like Ibsen, Doherty has tremendous fun in making Chatelier so unremittingly awful. The writer-performer has also written himself into the melodrama as a literally towering talent who laughs off the barbs of his critics. Their impotent words have no effect on him. Whyever would you think they do? 

Yes, the play is very in-jokey – but laughing at the mores of thin-skinned actor-comedians and the sheer pettiness of this whole endeavour, not just the clichés about reviewers, levels the playing field. The hyper-exaggerated caricatures on all sides are a blast, and Doherty performs this preposterous Hammer horror parody with fantastic vim. 

His frivolous script contains some great gags, too, though the insubstantial plot would benefit from more elements or twists to flesh out the story if he’s to rival masters of gothic comedy like The League Of Gentlemen or Garth Marenghi.

In comparison, Reviewers Welcome… TO DIE! feels a bit straightforward, however gleefully the premise is seized. But I’m certain he’ll take these three-and-a-half stars with good grace…

Review date: 11 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard