Through vivid character work and infectious audience games, A&E Comedy create the rare feeling of a theatre full of strangers behaving like old friendsRating
Excellent
Most interactive comedy asks the audience to participate. London Clown Festival’s character sketch show Do All The Things asks them to collaborate. The show is like being invited over by your crazy aunts for an afternoon of good old-fashioned fun.
Amid a jam-packed hour of character sketches, Abigail Dooley and Emma Joy Edwards of A&E Comedy find time for dancing, a conga line, compliments, pranks, and audience games. The show’s organising principle is the Thingo: a bingo card on which audience members tick off moments as they occur. Rather than receiving individual cards, spectators are grouped together around shared ones, immediately transforming strangers into teammates. With unapologetic abandon, together, we get up to all the things.
Many of the character sketches target a particular kind of pseudo-intellectual. Science, art, and spirituality are all skewered as the performers bring familiar stereotypes to life. Their characterisations tap into the subconscious images we carry of these people, taking our vague sense of what a scientist, an artist, or a tree-hugger is and rendering it in vivid, vital detail.
For instance, sporting goggles, frizzy hair, and an eccentric speech pattern, the scientist character delivers a presentation explaining a series of generic stock images labelled “science”. The sketch never concerns itself with actual scientific ideas. Instead, it draws laughs from the visual and verbal clichés we instinctively associate with the subject. The humour is immediate and visceral, elevated by the duo’s gift for comic performance. Their voice work is particularly strong. A fake advert for a Swiss beauty clinic stands out as another highlight.
Art receives similar treatment. One sketch pokes fun at the tendency to justify bad work with grand theories about what it supposedly says about the bad world. Yet the performers never come across as cynical. Even as they mock pretension, they invite the audience to join in, culminating in a naughty art project where we are encouraged to colour, stick, and customise Dooley and Edwards to our hearts’ content.
That spirit of collective play is what makes the show special. The bingo cards, mini-challenges, and opportunities to interact with strangers have the feel of dinner-party icebreakers. They encourage us to conspire together, compliment one another, and discuss what on earth it is we’re watching. It is how friendships are made in the real world.
There is a real lightness of touch throughout. Every hint of a sincere message arrives wrapped in absurdity. A clear feminist sensibility runs through the show: there’s nothing women should do except what they want. This sentiment emerges with a healthy dose of comic irony in backstage CCTV videos that show Dooley and Edwards changing costumes between sketches. “Joy is a political act,” one tells the other – while half-dressed as a spiritual guru, half-dressed as a mad scientist, and half-naked. For all their delight in exposing pretension, Dooley and Edwards are refreshingly free of it themselves. They understand that comedy can be clever without losing sight of joy, freedom, and connection. The goal is for everyone to enjoy themselves. Everything else is a bonus: the sharp observations, memorable character work, and the free badge. If joy is a political act, Do All The Things is both kinds of party.
Created by Abigail Dooley and Emma Joy Edwards
Do All The Things ran for one night only on Saturday 6 June at Soho Theatre Upstairs as part of the London Clown Festival and has now concluded its run
