Latest news with #JennyEclair
BBC News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Over 3,000 shows announced for 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Miriam Margoyles, Jenny Eclair and Bill Bailey are among the performers appearing in more than 3,000 shows at this year's Edinburgh Festival programme for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has been launched, including 3,352 shows across 265 music, dance, children's shows, magic and cabaret will all be part of the arts festival, which runs from August 1 to themes for 2025 include the apocalypse, rave culture, disability and sexuality. New venues this year include Hibs' Easter Road stadium. Portobello Town Hall will also host acts for the first time, with a mini-festival to celebrate Palestinian art and culture, called Welcome to the Fringe, Famous Spiegeltent - a Belgian wood and canvas, mirrored venue dating back to the 19th century - will return to its traditional festival home in St Andrew of the distinctive tents will set up in a car park at the Gyle Shopping centre, where an Italian company will present a circus show. There are 325 free shows and 529 pay-what-you-can shows, and accommodation has been provided by several universities to make the Fringe more accessible to 923 shows are from Scotland, predominantly from Edinburgh, with 657 acts represented, compared to 1,392 from the rest of the UK nations, while a total of 54 non-British nationalities are on the Lankester, chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, said: "This year's Fringe programme is filled with every kind of performance, so whether you're excited for theatre or circus, or the best of comedy, music, dance, children's shows, magic or cabaret; get ready to dare to discover this August." On the bill Famous faces such as Miriam Margoyles, Jenny Eclair and Bill Bailey will all headline like Alice Hawkins - Working Class Suffragette at the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre explores a family connection with the campaign for democracy while VOTE the Musical at Paradise Green takes a "gripping look" at the Suffragettes, exploring activism and personal sacrifice, according to Stone's play Happy Ending Street, at Leith Arches, tells a story about three Scottish sex workers dreaming of escaping from their way of life.
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jenny Eclair: Jokes Jokes Jokes review – deliciously carefree and crude
Standup show or book tie-in? Jokes Jokes Jokes is a bit of both, a panorama of Jenny Eclair's 65 years on Earth based on her autobiography of last year. It has only chronology to bind it together, which is fine for a book but can leave a stage show feeling – well, a bit lacking. But any deficit of focus or argument is made up by the tremendous carefree vim our host brings to her task. Jokes both good and crude are delivered with a gleeful cackle and a capering lap of (usually dis-)honour, arms aloft, from one side of the stage to the other. She deserves to celebrate: the show traces the career of a real trouper, who's faced down adversity, her own ego, sexism and the menopause, and always found a way to keep cheerfully telling the tales. It opens in 1960 ('just think series 4 of Call the Midwife …'), when Eclair, as she then wasn't, was born to a mum disabled by polio and a dad who may have been a spy. From the off, she sought fame; 'Jenny Eclair' is what she named the 'showbiz tapeworm' burrowing away inside her. But fame – via anorexia (after being branded 'too fat' at drama school) and performance poetry – was neither easily found nor easily held on to. Eclair is endearingly frank about her foibles here, and keeps the Grumpy Old Woman shtick – those cliches of decrepitude to the fore on her last tour – in check. OK, so there's abundant 'aren't I awful?' sexual and scatalogical candour ('labia like spaniel's ears, darling!'). There are also several robust set-pieces, like the routine that begins 'every decade [of one's life] needs its own survival kit', and one comparing public peeing in one's 50s as opposed to one's 20s. Alongside those identifiably standup moments are heartfelt autobiographical scenes, like the vivid anecdote about feeling peckish at her mother's deathbed. The show doesn't so much end as stop; Eclair's life is still in-progress, after all. You could wish for a more artfully constructed show – but you'll leave looking forward to the life story's next instalment. Touring until 8 June
