Comedy Review: Ivo Graham's Educated Guess
Looks like this article is a bit old. Be aware that information may have changed since it was published.
Ivo Graham's show Educated Guess is back at Soho Theatre in January 2018. Here's what we thought when we saw it on a previous run in October 2017.
Early into his Soho Theatre hour, Ivo Graham gets gently, poshly heckled by Phil from Henley-on-Thames. Graham falls on it gleefully. 'The Graham audience! If you're not friends of my parents, you're friends of friends of my parents.'
The backbone of the show comes from Graham trading off his privileged, ex-Etonian background, and prodding the stereotypes — undeserved and deserved — that come with it.
It's well-trodden ground, not least in his own past shows. But Graham treads it so well.
Educated Guess takes us on a self-deprecating tour of his school years through to his newfound and still precarious sense of adulthood, detouring via an appearance on the Weakest Link described by Graham's mother as 'bafflingly bitter'.
Segments on the boarding school camaraderie of sharing a single USB stick of porn with your entire year are balanced with more heartfelt stuff on trying to turn himself into a real adult through the application of general knowledge. Affable but brutally incisive, gentle with the audience but merciless at his own expense, his latest show picks up most of the same concerns as previous ones, but the self-scrutiny's coupled with a new, broader perspective.
It's still the same Ivo Graham. Just more so.
Ivo Graham: Educated Guess, Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, Soho, W1D 3NE. Tickets from £9, from 17-20 January 2018.
Last Updated 05 January 2018
