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The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
John Tothill: This Must Be Heaven review – joyful look at earthly pleasures brings us closer to standup paradise
Both his previous shows having almost killed him, the bar for success is set low for John Tothill at this year's fringe. But you wouldn't bet against this cat with nine lives high-achieving his way to award recognition this year, so confident is his comic voice, so frothy and delightful the hour we spend in his company. Rare is the standup with nary a grump, not a whisper of self-importance nor a scintilla of cynicism – just effervescent joy taken in our company, the world and so many wonderful things in it. And erudition, too, and surprising ideas to undergird the giddy comedy. An act much given to sweeping historico-cultural theses attends in This Must Be Heaven to gluttony, its distinction from greed, and how it challenges the individualism of our age. Tothill's case study is the Georgian-era guzzler Edward Dando, who ate oysters by the barrowload and refused to pay for them. What a hero, argues our host – at least once he's dispensed all the absolutely essential gossip that forms the first third of the show. How much of that is extemporised, who knows, as the Essex man riffs ecstatically on how his audience is dressed, on a trip to the Margate Crab Museum, and on a dread experience he recently had gigging aboard a cruise ship. ('It made the House of Lords look like Love Island.') No one is better at making this stuff seem as if it's tripping apropos of nothing off his tongue, and few bring to it such vivacity. A buffet interaction on that fateful cruise gives the show its moral, which is to be grateful not grizzly at the abundance life puts our way. You might ascribe that life-affirming credo, shot through the entire act, to the most recent of Tothill's brushes with death: he gives us a lurid account here of the exploded appendix that up-ended his 2024 fringe. Perhaps the 'stupid and immature' (his doctor's words) recklessness that risked ending it all is the flipside of Tothill's zest for life, this committed self-indulger's paradoxical negation of the self. Here's to him safely surviving the fringe this month; he's certainly thriving at it. At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 24 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews
Scotsman
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Fringe Comedy reviews: John Tothill
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... John Tothill: This Must Be Heaven Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) ★★★★☆ Thanyia Moore: August Upstairs at Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) ★★★☆☆ Alison Spittle: BIG Monkey Barrel 1 (Venue 515) ★★★★☆ Ben Pope: The Cut The Box at Assembly George Square (Venue 8) ★★★★☆ Cat Cohen: Broad Strokes Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) ★★★★☆ John Tothill's gorgeously louche character could have us spellbound whether he had a strong story to tell or not, but, good gracious, does he have a humdinger of a tale in This Must Be Heaven. Last year he funded his Fringe run by taking part in a medical experiment that gave him malaria – and plenty of material for that year's show, The Last Living Libertine. But a few days into the run he developed crippling stomach pain which he tried, like the jolly-old pro he is, to ignore. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad John Tothill: This Must Be Heaven | Contributed The symptoms worsened and it turned out that his appendix had been obliterated, causing intra-abdominal sepsis that could have killed him. The poor man was hallucinating with it and could barely move. His description of the ordeal is wrapped in a velvety bundle of whimsical flourishes, in which he touches upon everything from the Margate Crab Museum's devotion to destroying the bourgeoisie to the ways in which his love of indulgence is hindering his goals. After several playful teasers, he tells us about Edward Dando, an unapologetic Victorian oyster glutton and thief. This was a man, declares the foppish Tothill, who was free; who truly knew himself. It's deliriously fun being in the company of someone who wears his learning with such playful elegance, every sentence and gesture delivering a big laugh. He's like a devilish cocktail of the best elements of Oscar Wilde, Miles Jupp and your favourite naughty friend whose persuasive 'Oh, let's have one more, darling,' leads to you calling in sick the following day. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It was also during the Fringe – two years ago – that Thanyia Moore ended up in hospital. Well prepared and supported, she was excited for the debut show that she'd been working towards for years, and she was going to 'Usain Bolt' it. But her pregnancy (she was in the first trimester) started going wrong almost immediately, and what followed were frustrating medical interventions, a necessary trip back to London, cancelled shows and a heartbreaking emotional response. Thanyia Moore: August | Rebecca Need-Menear Moore, an assured and charismatic presence with a persuasive style of storytelling, has taken time to process what happened and how she reacted at the time (blocking her loved ones, for example, after telling them what had happened), and, despite the sadness of her story, she's always in control of the mood. We're left with a clear-eyed insight into the myriad ways in which people react to losses such as this, underpinned by a comfortingly logical acceptance of statistical probability of unviable pregnancies. And, as she puts it, the comedian's curse is that 'We don't have a bad day; we have material.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Alison Spittle's medical problems were life-threatening. In BIG, her finest show to date, she describes how a cellulitis skin infection triggered by a fall turned into septicaemia, which then caused her organs to start shutting down. And in true millennial style, she started having a panic attack in hospital because she didn't have the capacity to reply to everyone who'd sent her messages of concern on Instagram. A gifted storyteller with an irresistible turn of phrase and a true gift for comedy, she has some important things to say about fatphobia – from amusement parks and clothes shops to outright cruelty during a moment when what she needed was empathy. The day Adele slimmed down was her 9/11, she jokes, and, sadly, Spittle almost feels as if she has to justify the medical reasons behind her own significant weight loss. 'I became fat so I could destroy the NHS from within,' she quips, partly in response to a well-meaning but ignorant suggestion from a family member that she lose some weight. And while, politically, Spittle had claimed her space, the sleep apnoea, pre-diabetes and cellulitis all had the same cause and she didn't really have a choice but to go on weight-loss injections. People develop their own forms of armour following traumatic experiences, and Spittle trusts us with a brief but courageous insight into something that happened to her when she was very young. BIG is a beautifully crafted piece of work – as important and funny as it is radical. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ben Pope's need for surgery wasn't an emergency, but his problem was causing discomfort. Like one in 100 people with penises, he had phimosis – an excess of foreskin. As with an Amazon delivery, there was too much packaging, he jokes. But although he covers, with great wit and gentle, instinctive charm, the process of deciding to 'Marie Kondo' his body, entertaining interactions with medical experts and the ensuing pain (gosh, but there's a horribly vivid simile to look forward to), The Cut seems really to be about the value of communication and love. On one level, there's the conversation his girlfriend instigates about his intimate problem (and some funny-cos-they're-true observations about how ill-equipped we are linguistically to compliment a penis), while on another he shares insight about his relationship with his father, who lived with Parkinson's over the past decade of his life. In order to help his dad continue to do things he loved, Pope, a man who's clearly as generous as he is self-deprecating, would facilitate the older man's interests in a way that appears to have brought them both emotionally and physically closer. There's nothing mawkish here, though: it's just a beautifully constructed and communicated slice of life that also happens to be funny all the way through. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The term 'main character energy' could have been invented for Cat Cohen, who's made a career out of her dramatic self-obsession. It's a trait that might be tiresome in less boldly talented hands, but delivering it via comedy cabaret packed with some extremely candid personal information, she's a true star of our age. Cat Cohen: Broad Strokes | Dev Bowman At the age of 30 the American discovered she'd had a stroke (though it's hard to determine exactly when it happened), caused by a hole in her heart. Having been a lifelong hypochondriac who will forever be outraged by having been called a 'normal girl' at stage school, she felt not only vindicated by the medical revelation, but thrilled about the attention it would deliver. Sure, she had to cancel a Fringe run and European tour for the surgery and she makes artful sport about the fact that she hates not to be in control, but she certainly gets a lot of mileage out of it and the adoration from her largely millennial audience seems absolute. All shows run until 24 August
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Comedian John Tothill: ‘My second near-death experience? I blame the bedtime cheesy chips'
'In retrospect, I should have gone to the doctors much, much earlier.' John Tothill is talking about his 2024 Edinburgh fringe. You'll have heard some hair-raising fringe stories in your time. I doubt you've heard – until now! – of a performer who contrived almost to die, twice, in the delivery of consecutive fringe shows. In order to fund his first set The Last Living Libertine, Tothill volunteered on a drugs trial: he was paid £2,000 to be infected with a deadly strain of malaria, a wheeze that went badly wrong when he began suffering from a bout of the disease greatly in excess of doctors' expectations. Thankfully, Tothill recovered. Then, while telling this story on stage last summer at the Pleasance, the Essex man started to experience sudden and severe stomach pain. He soldiered on, delaying a trip to hospital until his day off midway through the festival. This was unwise. 'When people talk about an exploded appendix, what they mean is, it's started to leak. But my appendix had, in my doctor's terms, obliterated. It had fully fallen apart and was floating around inside me. I'd gone into intra-abdominal sepsis, which is obviously a very high-risk state.' This Edinburgh fringe-lover, so desperate not to miss a show he'd performed through acute pain until a break in his schedule, ended up cancelling nine performances. 'They cut through my stomach muscles so I couldn't sit up. I couldn't eat. But obviously it was less painful than what I'd been going through previously.' He pauses. 'Writing a standup show.' And so, for the second year running, Tothill arrives in Edinburgh with a near-death experience to relate – although this one will be 'couched in a general history of gluttony in England,' he tells me over coffee in a London cafe. That's par for the scholarly course as far as Tothill is concerned. His persona, which arrived fully formed on the fringe two summers ago, is one of giddy intellectual self-delight. He fizzes with foppish pleasure at our company as he discourses on his life, high-minded philosophy, and the bathetic discrepancies between them. 'It needs to be on stilts,' says Tothill of his unique style: 'so high-status that it becomes low-status again. A kind of idiot academic [combined with] the naive hedonism of a slightly nerdy misfit. The dream is, you should feel like your parents have dropped you off at university in your first year, and you've wandered in to some idiot's room, and he's just so excited to be there. I was a bit like that at university,' adds the former Cambridge Footlights man, 'all self-absorbed excitement in the idea that I'd met my people. There's probably more of me in the character than I care to admit.' Tothill credits the late, great director Adam Brace with helping him find this standup voice, and in remarkably short order: he took up standup in November 2022, nine months before his first full-length fringe set. While comedy had 'always been the dream', he'd previously worked as a primary school teacher – an experience he draws on in his shows. 'Having been a teacher grounds my stage persona,' he says now. 'The audience can understand [my shows] as a sort of pretentious lesson.' His debut set argued that hedonism in England died with the Reformation; its follow-up Thank God This Lasts Forever explored the pleasure principle and the Aristotelian good life – but also includes tales of boisterous socialising and a mouse infestation in Tothill's flat. The glee he displays on stage (to his audience: 'I'm obsessed with you …!') finds its echo in Tothill's feelings about the festival, which he just can't wait to revisit – not least because he missed so much of last year's. 'It's brilliant, and it continues to be brilliant,' he insists – not the most fashionable opinion these days. 'It's very touching that there are people who want to come and see five shows a day. That's life-affirming. Edinburgh's main competitor is not another arts festival – it's people staying at home and not coming to things. And that's disgusting. That's outrageous. That's unforgivable.' Those who do come to This Must Be Heaven are promised the tale of Edward Dando, 'a folk hero in Victorian London,' Tothill tells me, 'who ate hundreds of oysters and refused to pay for them'. Of such overindulgent forebears, Tothill is the proud inheritor. 'My standup persona sees himself as the final incarnation of a long-forgotten tradition, his appendix story the culmination of centuries of a misguided culture.' The irony is that before falling sick last summer, 'I was taking [the fringe] very seriously,' he protests. 'I wasn't drinking, I was eating as healthily as I could.' He blames his medical crisis on one fatal portion of cheesy chips, 'and I ate them far too close to bed.' Fatty foods are an occupational hazard for visitors to the fringe – but presumably Tothill, two brushes with death down, will be more careful this time round? 'Well, in some ways,' he counters, 'you graduate from a second near-death experience with a degree of cockiness you don't get from just one. So no, I don't think it has taught me to be more moderate. If anything, I'm going to be making up for lost time.' John Tothill: This Must Be Heaven is at the Pleasance Courtyard from 30 July to 24 August. He plays Soho theatre, London, from 6-11 October
