King's Speech: Genius 2.0 At Soho Theatre
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Last Updated 19 April 2019
At 53, Simon Evans isn’t so different from circuit comedians half his age — a rhetorical stream of invective squirted squarely at current events, with the exception that he speaks entirely in well-honed sentences, not an er, ah or um in sight.
At Soho Theatre the audience was a fair mix of his natural Radio 4 constituency with a sprinkling of urbanites, so his observations about ageing, alcohol and memory loss went down well, although the best response was to his Brexit-based riffs seen through the eyes of his elderly Norfolk parents: dad an unreconstructed Brexiteer, mother who hisses like a cat whenever Boris Johnson comes on television. They should have their own show.
Surreal projections of Alan Turing twerking on a Gay Pride float, or the perhaps slightly over-long comparisons between the Guinness Book of Records published when he was 9 with the one he’s just given his 9-year-old son, demonstrate his ability to find humour in the widest range of topics.
This is not a new show, more or less the same one aired at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018, but it’s freshly delivered and worth going if only for the vintage pubic hair joke.
And those polished sentences. Subjunctives and everything. Masterly.
Genius 2.0, Soho Theatre, Dean Street, W1. Tickets £20, until 20 April (then touring).
