The moment Liv Ello enters from off-stage, making their way abruptly across a row of seated audience members all of whom must adjust, you realise that you are in for a disruptive experience. Their unruly journey to the main stage is accompanied by a deafening soundtrack of droning insects. Ello has not come to comfort or assuage, but to brashly chronicle the fate of England under the Tory ruling power. This is a bracing state of the nation address, equal parts angry and despairing. They wield humour with a vicious precision. The audience continually emits gasps of laughter at the audacious material. Occasionally, people in the front row are confronted in direct address. 

Ello wears a makeshift dark suit with four extensions, white wings, and green goggles, flitting about as a fly. The work’s title is a reference to David Cameron’s notoriously dehumanising statement linking migrants crossing into the EU as a league of vermin, as a species less than. As Ello makes clear almost from the start, opening a bag of dog deposits and feasting on the contents, we are in the shit. They suggest a wider definition of parasite. Riffing hilariously on specific genuses of flies, Ello links each one to a particularly heinous example of conservative monster. Blow Fly, for example, has as backdrop the exquisitely awkward, squirming, ridiculous interview with Michael Gove in which he apologised for having done cocaine. No one escapes a razor-sharp skewer: Gove’s political peers (Theresa May, Boris Johnson), dishonest estate agents, Shoreditch start-up entrepreneurs, vapid equine dollies, football louts, corporate virtue signallers, the clueless self-absorbed. All are called out for lack of insight or interest in the predicaments of people outside themselves (or perhaps only curious when there is financial benefit), avatars of unexamined entitlement. Throughout the run time, a bleak march of statistics appear on a rear screen, along with news-segment snippets of facile governmental rhetoric. It is the system, Ello concludes, that is evil. 

It’s only at the end when Ello makes an impassioned spoken-word speech that the stridency and earnestness so skilfully and otherwise sidestepped momentarily throws the pace off. Although delivered with the same impressive energy and commitment, Ello’s dark, sharp humour has already made the point without resort to such sober overstatement. A lovely bit precedes this, Ello removing wet clothes from a bin and placing them tenderly on stage to invoke the infamous image of drowned two-year-old Alan Kurdi, face down at water’s edge. This moment alone speaks beyond any number of words. 

Fearlessly opinionated, pointedly clever, gloriously bratty and truly original, Ello creates a profane playground that thrills with its personal immediacy. They are an unequivocal partisan. No matter one’s stance, it feels vital.

{🎟 AD – PR invite – Tickets were gifted in exchange for an honest review}

2 Star Review 3 Star Review 4 Star Review 5 Star Review 2022 2023 Adaptation Almeida Cabaret Camden Fringe Cast Announcement Christmas Comedy Dance Drag Edinburgh Fringe Edinburgh Fringe Interviews Fringe Immersive Interviews Jukebox Musical LGBTQIA+ Lyric Hammersmith Manchester Musical New Musical News New Wimbledon Theatre North West Off West End Park Theatre Play Review Revival Richmond Theatre Round Up Royal Court Theatre Shakespeare Show Announcement Show Recommendations Soho Theatre Southwark Playhouse Touring Production VAULT Festival West End

• 
  A PISSEDMAS CAROL – REVIEW – LEICESTER SQUARE
  by Amy Rye
  The infamous Sh!t Faced Showtime are back in London with a festive edition, they have taken Dickens’ classic and put a drunken spin on it. The formula is the same as other iterations of the Shi!t Faced shows, one member of the cast has been boozing, and this time it is John Milton who plays Scrooge. Before the show, half a bottle of Jim Beam, some wine, and beer have been consumed in the previous 4 hours. The rest of the cast, try to keep the show on track, also aided by James Murfitt as the compere, Charles Dickens. The … More A PISSEDMAS CAROL – REVIEW – LEICESTER SQUARE
• 
  A CHRISTMAS CAROL – REVIEW – ALEXANDRA PALACE
  by Ellie Preston
  Spine-tingling yet heart-warming, Mark Gatiss’s retelling of A Christmas Carol truly encapsulates the haunting atmosphere of a Victorian ghost story, balanced out with enough humour so as to capture the festive season. Led by Keith Allen as Scrooge, with Peter Forbes as Marley, this show is perfect for Christmas viewing. The set design by Paul Wills is instantly captivating, containing stacks of metal cabinets towering over the theatre, moveable by the cast to allow space for other central props like doors, beds and tables. In addition to this, the puppetry design by Matthew Forbes is incredibly clever, adding creepy elements to the show such … More A CHRISTMAS CAROL – REVIEW – ALEXANDRA PALACE
• 
  A WOMAN WALKS INTO A BANK – REVIEW – THEATRE503
  by Tom Carrao
  The title of this winner of Theatre 503’s 2023 International Playwriting Award by Roxy Cook may seem like the set-up to a joke, but the narrative that unspools is instead an affectionate, gently barbed and at base quite sobering portrait of three ordinary souls (and one restless feline) adrift in modern Moscow. There is much affable, satirical back-and-forth commentary on the accepted myths & stereotypes of the Russian spirit & soul. Beset by the indignities of age, opportunism, graft, fatigue, the characters orbit one another, doomed to play out their roles in an unjust, predatory and saturnine universe. The play opens … More A WOMAN WALKS INTO A BANK – REVIEW – THEATRE503
• 
  PETER PAN GOES WRONG – REVIEW – LYRIC THEATRE
  by Amy Rye
  Peter Pan Goes Wrong first premiered in London at the Pleasance Theatre in 2013, and earlier this year the show made its Broadway debut. Now the production is back in the West End for the Christmas season. Following on from The Play That Goes Wrong, in this production, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is staged by the fictitious Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society and goes awry, disastrously so. The meta-comedy is filled with slapstick comedy, sometimes the humour may be predictable and silly, but it’s universally funny throughout – there is something for everyone here, and the laughs come thick and fast … More PETER PAN GOES WRONG – REVIEW – LYRIC THEATRE
• 
  GHOST STORIES BY CANDLELIGHT – REVIEW – SAM WANAMAKER PLAYHOUSE
  by George Rennie
  Drawing heavily from the classic canon of the British supernatural, HighTide’s trio of contemporary Gothic narratives uses traditional storytelling formats to address contemporary themes. Directed by Elayce Ismail, reverent musical interludes accompany tales of apparitions and nighttime conjurings that speak of women from the East of England. Unfortunately, the effect is less chilling and more lightweight, with conventional structures, predictable plot twists and an over-reliance on external forces to drive narrative shoring up some of the less relatable aspects of the genre. Nicola Werenowska’s The Beach House, perhaps the cleanest of the three tales, tells of a mother and daughter’s … More GHOST STORIES BY CANDLELIGHT – REVIEW – SAM WANAMAKER PLAYHOUSE