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Awesome new albums, great gigs, spectacular stage performances, a host of fantastic films and cracking comedy shows – they are all featured in our critics’ picks of the best of music, theatre, film and comedy.
Our experts have explored all the options for culture vultures to get their teeth into, and decided on the music, plays and movies that are well worth dedicating your weekend to.
Read on to find out what to see and do…
MUSIC
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Taylor Swift
The Tortured Poets Department Out now
From 2012’s brash Red through to 2022’s more subtle Midnights, Taylor Swift has a penchant for single-word album titles. Over those ten years, the American superstar has also given us 1989, Reputation, Lover, Folklore and Evermore. The fact that her latest comes with a more protracted handle suggests that something is afoot in the Swiftieverse.
There’s certainly a sense that she’s pulling out all the stops on The Tortured Poets Department. Even for someone with a track record of lengthy, value-for-money albums, it’s a mammoth undertaking. Its 16 songs stretch out across 66 tireless minutes, with bonus tracks take the running time to over 74 minutes. It’s essentially a double album. It’s also an immersive, cinematic affair that often feels more like an old Hollywood film script than a straightforward pop record.
The lyrical mood of Taylor Swift’s new album The Tortured Poets Department is one of tarnished romance, with clever internal rhymes and buckets of skilfully-scripted melodrama
The good news for Swifties is that the 34-year-old’s astonishing work ethic hasn’t led to a dip in songwriting quality. Including four re-recordings, this is her ninth LP in five years, and it’s well up to the standard of the older albums she’s currently revisiting on The Eras Tour, a career-spanning show which hits UK stadiums this June.
Written on the US leg of that tour, it isn’t a major departure musically. Two of her regular collaborators, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, are the main co-writers, and many of her lyrically-rich songs are built around shimmering electronics and inarguably great tunes. There are two duets – one with soft-voiced US star Post Malone, one with UK singer Florence Welch – and passing hints of folk music.
Before we even get to the songs, the mood is set by an LP sleeve that features a written introduction by Taylor, who signs herself off as The Chairman Of The Tortured Poets Department. There’s also a poem, ‘for T and me’, by Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks.
It’s a far cry from Swift’s early days in Nashville: a flair for storytelling and the odd spot of vocal phrasing aside, there are few traces of her country roots here. While the rest of the pop world, from Beyoncé to Lana Del Rey, is hitching a ride on the country hay-wagon, Taylor is once again heading in a different direction.
The lyrical mood is one of tarnished romance, with clever internal rhymes and skilfully-scripted melodrama by the bucketload. The album opens with Fortnight, an electronic ballad in which Taylor, accompanied by Post Malone, suggests she’s on the verge of a breakdown. ‘I was supposed to be sent away, but they forgot to come and get me,’ she warns. ‘I was a functioning alcoholic until nobody noticed my new aesthetic.’
Fans who pore over her lyrics will have plenty to entertain them. This is her first new album since the end of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn and, while she doesn’t mention Alwyn by name, speculation will be rife that tracks such as So Long, London – which contains a reference to ‘the house by The Heath’ – are about him.
The odd misstep is inevitable. Down Bad feels like one sad, electronic ballad too many. But, just as you fear the album might be losing momentum, up pops another classic in the making such as Florida!!! – sung with Welch – or Guilty As Sin?
‘I’m so depressed, I act as if it’s my birthday every day,’ she sings on I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.
Whatever comes her way, the show must go on. So, even as her record-breaking tour rolls on towards its final show in December, a new Era is already under way.
Adrian Thrills
TWO GREAT GIGS
Take That
They were Britain’s biggest boy band in the 1990s, but Take That could easily have fallen by the wayside after founding members Robbie Williams and Jason Orange flew the coop ten years ago (Robbie for the second time).
Howard Donald, Gary Barlow and Mark Owen at their spectacular arena concert
Instead, they started afresh, and this spectacular arena concert — billed as This Life On Tour — was a colourful vindication of their decision to relight the fire as a slimmed-down three-piece.
In front of a sold-out crowd of 12,000 in South Yorkshire, it was everything that a great pop show should be.
Their voices dovetailing beautifully, Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard Donald made energetic use of a 100ft-long stage that spanned one entire end of the arena.
The centrepiece of the night was a time-travelling journey through the band’s career. Presented as a spoof This Is Your Life TV show, it traced Take That’s progress from their formation in Manchester in 1990, through the fan hysteria and solo releases that followed, to a lucrative 2005 reunion. Bringing everything up to date, it concluded with tracks from last year’s ninth studio album, This Life.
Donald, an underrated and surprisingly soulful singer, delivered some of the lines originally sung by Robbie Williams, while all three members also played instruments: Barlow on piano, Owen on guitar and Donald on drums.
And it wasn’t just about the glory days. Songs from This Life have yet to attain the crowd-pleasing status of older hits, but their inclusion showcased a trio, all now in their 50s, who continue to move forwards.
Towards the end of the night, the band moved to a smaller ‘B’ stage. They donned glistening silver capes to sing Greatest Day (with fans watching through 3-D glasses) before returning to the main podium for a finale that included Back For Good, Never Forget and Rule The World.
Global domination may be beyond them these days, but Take That are growing older with their talent (and humour) intact.
Adrian Thrills
Touring until June 22
Marty Wilde
If you’re ever looking for live music in early January, your best bet is Butlin’s. At Skegness, they put on the Festival Of The 60s, where grizzled singers rub shoulders with tribute bands. The punters sit at cabaret tables, hang their walking sticks on the backs of their chairs and wonder whether to take to the floor for a tentative jitterbug.
At Butlin’s, Marty Wilde shows he still has his voice, his presence and his marbles
This year the main draw was a singer who had his first hit in 1958, two months before Cliff Richard. Born Reg Smith, he is better known as Marty Wilde. Now 84 and a great-grandfather, he has been married for 64 years to Joyce, who is also his manager.
In 2020 Marty pipped Cliff again to become the first person to reach the UK top 75, as a singer or songwriter, in eight different decades. Much of that success came from co-writing songs with his son Ricky, to be sung by his daughter Kim. On Kim’s latest tour, before Christmas, Ricky was on guitar with his daughter Scarlett on backing vocals. When Kim mentioned her father, Scarlett said: ‘He’s amazing, Grandad.’
At Butlin’s, Marty lives up to that billing. He still has his voice, his presence and his marbles.
Even Bruce Springsteen has an autocue these days, but not Marty Wilde. He shows his age only with his stage times: on at 3.15pm, gone by 4.30. His band, the Wildcats, get a packed house of about 500 going with their big warm sound. They play only a handful of their own hits, concentrating on covers of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly.
This may be the only gig at which you will ever be asked if you remember Conway Twitty. But not all of the crowd are elderly: I spotted at least two people who were definitely under 60. For Marty, the encroaching years are something to laugh about. ‘In our contract,’ he declares, ‘it says anyone with their own hair and teeth can’t be in the band.’
But nobody cares about hair and teeth when there’s enough heart and soul. By the end, he has hundreds of pensioners singing ‘Why must I be a teenager in love?’.
Tim de Lisle
Touring until December 4
AND TWO MORE AWESOME ALBUMS OUT NOW
JAMES: Yummy
Manchester veterans James’s 18th studio effort adds fresh layers to a sound first honed in the 1980s, when their local peers were New Order, The Smiths and The Fall.
Like Simple Minds, another act still going strong after breaking through in the 1980s, James have been refreshed by adding a female vocalist. Chloe Alper is a foil to Tim Booth in much the same way Sarah Brown complements Jim Kerr in Simple Minds.
Booth remains a compelling lyricist. Mobile God is penned from the perspective of a smartphone, while album closer Folks is a wry contemplation of mortality. It would be a perfect farewell… were it not for the fact that there’s still plenty of life left in James.
Adrian Thrills
ENGLISH TEACHER: This Could Be Texas
The fast-rising Leeds quartet are often bracketed alongside a new wave of punky guitar bands, but the pigeonholing does them a disservice.
There are some abrasive rock numbers on this highly promising debut, but also detours into delicate indie-pop and brooding balladry.
Singer Lily Fontaine is quietly charismatic, her conversational lyrics addressing intolerance on the powerful Albert Road and her own chronic indecision on Mastermind Specialism, where she likens herself to a hesitant bride and a child who jumps off a playground slide halfway down the chute.
Adrian Thrills
THEATRE
SHOW OF THE WEEK
Love’s Labour’s Lost
A new era at the RSC, with the dynamic duo of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey at the helm, opens with a sunny and (eventually) charming rendition of Shakespeare’s slightly tricky romcom Love’s Labour’s Lost. The story’s been transposed to a wellness centre, where four young bucks vow to improve themselves by fasting, studying and seeing no women… That is, until a delegation of eye-catching ladies turn up to negotiate a deal with the boss.
Rising-star director Emily Burns, who impressed with Dear Octopus at the National Theatre, tries a little too hard at the start, overloading the stage with the fuss of an exclusive health resort. She barely copes with Shakespeare’s lamentable, supposedly comic, ventures into Latin wordplay.
As always the play works better in the character contests than in the big concept. In particular, horribly handsome Luke Thompson ( Bridgerton ’s Benedict), as supercilious playboy Berowne
There is also confusion caused by a roving band in Hawaiian shirts combining Spanish guitar music with Polynesian flute playing. Where exactly are we?
But once we’ve got through this contextual toil, the show comes alight, as the boys scribble secret sonnets to the girls and perform the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way — while wearing suits of armour.
Joanna Scotcher’s creamy set of twin stone staircases, palm trees and cloudless skies is a holiday brochure dream.
But as always the play works better in the character contests than in the big concept. In particular, horribly handsome Luke Thompson (Bridgerton’s Benedict), as supercilious playboy Berowne, meets his match in Ioanna Kimbook’s Rosaline — the savviest of the four women.
Her polite smile and scornful eyerolls crucify his most ardent endeavours. She knows that Berowne needs to grow up, because love is a game of consequence.
Patrick Marmion
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until May 18, 2hr 45mins
FOUR OTHER SPARKLING SHOWS
Underdog: The Other Other Bronte
There are plenty of meta moments in Underdog: The Other Other Bronte. It is 1837 and at the parsonage in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, aspiring writer Charlotte Bronte (Gemma Whelan), older sister of Emily (Adele James) and Anne (Rhiannon Clements), is reading her reply from the poet laureate Robert Southey, to whom she has sent her poems, asking his opinion of them.
Adele James, Gemma Whelan and Rhiannon Clements as the Bronte sister
Southey is not encouraging. ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,’ he writes. ‘He’s a bellend!’ declares Emily.
Sarah Gordon’s hilarious but ultimately moving comedy about the Brontes is a racy retelling of the sisters’ struggle to become recognised authors. Charlotte is determined to be as famous and lauded as the likes of Southey, but her ambition results in her overshadowing Anne, the full extent of whose talent was not acknowledged until long after her premature death.
The banter between the rival siblings is very sharp, there are some brilliant bits of business and much fun is poked at the prissy male critics horrified that such radical, fierce novels as Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall were written by women.
But Gordon also invites us to think seriously about how our view of these literary giants has been shaped, and about their battle to succeed in a profession dominated by men.
Incidentally, Charlotte really did write to Southey – an audacious move for the 20-year-old daughter of a country clergyman.
At the start of Underdog, Whelan wanders through the audience asking people their favourite Bronte novel. Everyone has an answer. How many people could even name a Southey poem?
Neil Armstrong
Dorfman Theatre, London. Until May 25, 2hrs 15mins
Mind Mangler
Ushers invite us to write a secret on a card and place it in a glass bowl. ‘Prepare to be delighted, astounded and amazed!’ booms a disembodied voice.
Prepare to be delighted and amazed at Mind Mangler Keith (Henry Lewis)
A big, shambling bloke with a bushy beard peers at the audience. ‘Think of a colour,’ challenges our host, holding an orange. Such is the mysterious suggestive power of self-aggrandising wannabe mentalist Keith (Henry Lewis), aka Mind Mangler.
Silly stand-up meets merry magic in the latest show from the troupe of Magic-Goes-Wrong veterans.
Wholly unsupported by his incompetent stooge (Jonathan Sayer, who is helpfully wearing a T-shirt labelled ‘Audience Member’), Keith hopelessly and obviously blunders his way through dodgy magic tricks. Everything that could possibly go wrong, does.
Keith cues a drum roll and an owl hoots. He gets locked in his vanishing cabinet. ‘Is there anybody there?’ he asks the Ouija board. ‘No,’ comes the reply. While his spoon refuses to bend, every other metal object on the stage bows.
Then comes the big reveal as brilliantly inept Keith turns miraculous mind-reader, exposing the secret of a random punter. Prepare to be delighted, astounded and amazed.
Georgina Brown
Apollo Theatre, London. Until April 28, then touring until June 16. 2hrs
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the mother of all family-row plays. Every modern broken-family drama owes it a debt. That includes Succession, whose star, Brian Cox, a limber 77, now returns to the stage in this American classic set on one day in 1912.
L-R: Laurie Kynaston, Brian Cox, Patricia Clarkson and Daryl McCormack
Cox plays James Tyrone, a has-been actor, a miser, a bully and an alcoholic. Both his sons have crawled inside a bottle of whisky to escape his withering tongue. Then there’s his poor wife, Mary, a hopeless dope addict.
There’s not a dud part in the play. The sons are terrific: Daryl McCormack exerts a futile charm as the whoring barfly son Jamie and Laurie Kynaston is the sweet, Edmund, a coughing poet.
Cox is at his best when he’s all crestfallen and on the verge of making up with these boys before a new blast of invective ruins it. For sheer presence, he is matched by screen star Patricia Clarkson, beautiful as the away-with-the-fairies Mary, her mind lost in a mist of sorrows, always aching for her next fix.
Louisa Harland (Derry Girls and Renegade Nell) as the sly Irish maid provides some much-needed laughs.
It could have done with a less bleak design – it’s all bare boards, and the sound of foghorns booming becomes its own lament for this ruined family.
But it would be wrong not to issue a customer warning. The evening is long, wordy and the second half is gruelling.
It doesn’t help that it’s directed by Jeremy Herrin with a hint of slavishness. But what an impressive great beast this play is, ripped from the gut of a writer who based Tyrone on his own ghastly father.
Watching these fine actors bring to life a family wrecked by addiction, their love for one another corroded by hatred, is sad but also weirdly uplifting. One’s own family issues don’t seem so bad after watching this lot.
Robert Gore-Langton
Wyndham’s Theatre, London. Until June 8, 3hrs 20mins
LAST CHANCE: The Divine Mrs S
The Divine Mrs S is about the actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831). ‘Mrs Siddons’ was a great star of her day but there is still no biography of her, so this new backstage comedy is very welcome.
Rachael Stirling plays Sarah Siddons with terrific vim in this welcome comedy
She is played with terrific vim by Rachael Stirling, in what at times seems like a Georgian version of Noises Off.
Siddons’ deep talent – we get a hint of her famous Lady Macbeth – is offset by her controlling brother, John Philip Kemble, a shouting ham actor played by Dominic Rowan with Ernie Wise levels of pretentiousness.
Then there’s an oily critic (Gareth Snook), Patti, a Barnsley girl who becomes Mrs S’s confidante (played by Anushka Chakravarti), and Eva Feiler as a young playwright called Baillie, who has to conceal her identity as a woman.
April De Angelis’s comedy has a wide feminist angle – the theatre is, after all, still a man’s world. But it’s an evening generously laden with jokes.
Even if you find these jokes over the top (though I didn’t), in Rachael Stirling’s genuinely moving portrait of the actress and survivor it’s a pleasure to meet the remarkable Mrs S.
Robert Gore-Langton
Hampstead Theatre, London. Until April 27, 2hrs 20mins
FILM
FILM OF THE WEEK
The Book Of Clarence Cert: 15, 2hrs 9mins
At first glance, The Book Of Clarence looks like a black American version of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian. True, nobody sings Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life during the crucifixion scene or tells the title character he’s just a ‘very naughty boy’ but otherwise the parallels are really quite marked.
It’s funny at times, flirts with blasphemy at others, and when Clarence of Jerusalem gets into serious money problems he becomes a false messiah, just as Brian of Nazareth did all those years ago.
Written and directed by the British film-maker Jeymes Samuel and co-produced by Jay-Z, The Book Of Clarence features a compelling central performance from LaKeith Stanfield
But these similarities turn out to be superficial. Written and directed by the British film-maker Jeymes Samuel and co-produced by Jay-Z, The Book Of Clarence has a wistful, almost mournful atmosphere and a compelling yet quietly subtle central performance from LaKeith Stanfield.
The result is a film that explores belief, non-belief and race, and will make you think every bit as much as it will make you laugh. The laid-back, likeable Clarence, who turns out to be the dope-peddling, chariot- racing brother of Doubting Thomas and grateful to anyone who puts two syllables in his name, is a firm non-believer. But he owes a ton of money to Jedediah the Terrible, so into the lucrative messiah business he must go.
With the picturesque, hilltop Italian city of Matera (it was also used in The Passion Of The Christ and the James Bond film No Time To Die) filling in convincingly for 1st-century Jerusalem, the film looks great, and I loved some of Samuel’s more surreal touches – particularly the floating hookah-pipe smokers and the disco routine.
He goes a bit Mel Gibson in the last lap – the stations of the cross sequence seems to go on for a blood-splattered eternity – but even then he has some clever and funny points still to make with the help of James McAvoy as Pontius Pilate and Benedict Cumberbatch as a rather important beggar.
Matthew Bond
FOUR MORE FABULOUS FILMS STILL IN CINEMAS
Back To Black
Cert: 15, 2hrs 2mins
Both Amy Winehouse’s father, Mitch, and ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, will be much happier with Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back To Black than they were with Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary, Amy.
Marisa Abela is brilliant as Amy and Jack O’Connell charms as Amy’s husband Blake
Mitch (Eddie Marsan) because he’s restored to the role of loving father and Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) because he’s portrayed, not as the man who introduced Amy to hard drugs, but as a charming cockney chancer.
Taylor-Johnson’s creative vision is essentially affectionate and celebratory rather than insightful and revelatory.
Marisa Abela is rather brilliant as Amy (her singing – she doesn’t lip-synch – is amazing) and it’s refreshing to see the now permanently tragic figure of Winehouse actually having fun.
Matthew Bond
The Teachers’ Lounge
Cert: 12A, 1hr 39mins
Carla Nowak is a mild-mannered teacher in a German school. She is also, in The Teachers’ Lounge, one of my favourite characters of the year.
Leonie Benesch is brilliant as Carla Nowak in The Teachers’ Lounge
For what Nowak (brilliantly played by Leonie Benesch) has is determination and belief, particularly when it comes to the children in her care.
Trouble is, not everyone sees things the same way. A series of small, well-intentioned actions on her part soon escalate into something bigger and trickier.
The ending is so abrupt that it feels almost violent, but, regardless, we’ll always have Miss Nowak.
Class dismissed.
Peter Hoskin
Civil War
Cert: 15, 1hr 49mins
Alex Garland’s Civil War takes the shape of a road movie: a truckful of journalists driving from New York City to Washington, D.C to try and secure the last interview with the president (Nick Offerman) before his government comes crashing down.
Kirsten Dunst is on career-best form as photojournalist Lee in Civil War
They are the veteran hack Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), war correspondent Joel (Wagner Moura), wannabe photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and her idol, Lee (Kirsten Dunst). Four fine performances, though only one weary, wonderful Dunst, who’s on career-best form here.
The landscape they pass through is the stuff of a hundred post-apocalypse flicks except there are no zombies or climate cataclysms here. It’s just politics.
Peter Hoskin
The First Omen
Cert: 15, 2hrs
The First Omen, notionally a prequel to The Omen (1976), stands on its own as a gripping horror film that unfolds like a thriller, and contains a superb central performance by Nell Tiger Free.
The First Omen contains a superb central performance by Nell Tiger Free
She plays a young American nun who in 1971 arrives to work at an orphanage in Rome, and there uncovers some deeply sinister goings on. A powerful cabal of clerics has decided that the only way to stop secularism is to bring the masses back to the church through fear, so naturally they plot a way of birthing the Antichrist. It’s a nuttily compelling premise which Arkasha Stevenson’s film realises splendidly.
Charles Dance has a pre-titles cameo, Ralph Ineson is excellent as an excommunicated Irish priest, and the Eternal City of 50-odd years ago is convincingly re-created. I found it harder to believe in Bill Nighy as a creepy cardinal, but you can’t have everything.
Brian Viner
COMEDY
SHOW OF THE WEEK
Michael McIntyre: Macnificent
The horrors of arena comedy are manyfold. One man and his mic alone on a giant stage blaring out to 20,000 people in the ninth-largest building in the world does not an evening of intimacy make.
Throw in the awful acoustics, endless queues and sky-high prices (£120 to sit up front and still end up watching on a screen) and you’ve got all the ingredients for a dismal night out.
Few comics can get away with it. But the fact that everyone shuffled out of The O2 at 10pm on a Sunday smiling and laughing tells you all you need to know. Michael McIntyre’s in town.
Perhaps the true measure of Michael McIntyre comes when he takes the oldest joke known to humanity – the fart gag – and manages to reduce even this old comedy cynic to hysterics
The booming, beaming star of Saturday primetime works the space like no other. Furiously pacing the stage, lying on the floor chatting to a security guard, rolling around like an excitable puppy dog… for a self-confessed fat man, at times it felt like he was doing a workout.
On the face of it there really shouldn’t be very much to laugh at. McIntyre’s material is pedestrian and unambitious in the extreme. He can comfortably glean enough material to fill 90 minutes without bothering to leave the house.
His wife features prominently, as do his dog and kids. We’re often in the kitchen or, you guessed it, the bedroom. Yet the genius of McIntyre is to take the most trite, pedestrian of observations and mine it for comedy gold.
A sequence on the marital mattress had fans bouncing in their seats. A section on wine consumption at home – ‘just a drop’ – had couples excitedly nudging each other and pointing.
But perhaps the true measure of the man comes when he takes the oldest joke known to humanity – the fart gag – and manages to reduce even this old comedy cynic to hysterics.
In the end, the show’s title may sound like a boast but, you have to admit, he’s not far wrong.
Mark Wareham
Touring until June 1
TWO OTHER COMEDIANS CURRENTLY ON TOUR
Count Arthur Strong: And It’s Goodnight From Him!
A Count Arthur Strong performance is that rare and wondrous thing in comedy: two hours of constant delight, with no agenda, no point-scoring and often no clue as to what’s occurring.
The trilby-hatted Count (Steve Delaney) is a meandering mess of a Variety throwback
The trilby-hatted Count (Steve Delaney) is a meandering mess of a Variety throwback, permanently bamboozled, continually digressing.
For 20 years he has shuffled onstage, mangling his vowels, spluttering spoonerisms and muttering malapropisms. But now it’s time to say farewell. Or is it? ‘I will be carrying on for an as yet unspecified number of farewell tours,’ he declares. Such is his cult following, he could carry on for ages with no end in sight.
When the Count works up a stream of befuddlement, exasperatedly berating himself it’s hard to imagine a more ridiculous sight in all of showbusiness.
And it’s all so deliriously silly. You want jokes? ‘I’m genderfluid? as long as it can be wiped up!’ Dancing? Here he is, throwing demented shapes to The Prodigy. A world first? How about puppets recreating the final performance by The Beatles? if only the Count could remember whether he’s supposed to be John or Paul.
At times it’s hard to keep up. Hang on. Steve Delaney is playing the Count, who is playing Larry Olivier, who is playing an unspecified British monarch, who is plucking the theme from Steptoe And Son on his banjo? How did we get here again? No matter. Like the Count, we’ve already forgotten.
Mark Wareham
Touring until June 9
LAST CHANCE: Vittorio Angelone: Who Do You Think You Are? I Am!
Every February for 30 years the Leicester Comedy Festival has quietly gone about its funny business. While the Edinburgh Fringe hogs the headlines, Leicester has acquired a reputation for unearthing talent. If you want to catch a comic on the up, without the eye-watering expenses required to visit Edinburgh in August, then Leicester in February is definitely the place to be.
Vittorio Angelone is sure to be soon riding the Taskmaster rocket to the top
Vittorio Angelone is a perfect illustration of what Leicester is all about. Comedian of the Year runner-up in 2023 with his debut show, the young Italian-Irishman is a star in the making. And don’t let his clunky title, Who Do You Think You Are? I Am!, put you off.
He claims not to be a relatable comedian and has the audacity to slate Michael McIntyre, but that’s all part of his swagger.
Don’t be fooled – this edgy Belfast boy is going places.
Straight-talking and with a hint of arrogance, he wears his ‘anyone but the English’ badge with pride. ‘It’s coming home…it never is!’ But he’s capable of more thoughtful material, such as when he reflects on his mental health: ‘I was so much happier before I found out how sad I was.’
In a cheeky aside, he claims to be jealous of female comics. ‘They do things I can’t. Like get on TV.’ Again, pure bluster. Angelone will be riding the Taskmaster rocket to the top soon enough. You can be sure of that.
Mark Wareham
Touring until May 3
