A welcoming and acutely funny stand-up show.Summary
Rating
Excellent
Is Angela Barnes a household name? It feels to me like she’s been in the public eye for years, being consistently funny and insightful on shows such as Mock the Week (RIP) and elsewhere. Maybe she’s not touring arenas or fronting a primetime TV series with her name in the title, but she’s certainly established enough that I was very keen to be in the audience to witness her latest stand-up show.
Angela (I think I’ve “known” her long enough for first names to be okay) charges onto the stage at Leicester Square Theatre to thank us for not staying home with Netflix watching the bizarre With Love, Meghan or Is It Cake?, which she seems to admire most because the title exactly captures the thought in the audience’s heads. After that brief “hello” she gives up the stage to her support act.
James Ellis is an exponent of typical British self-effacement and its sub-genre the hapless male who’s ceded control of his life to a more evidently capable wife. Frizzy of hair and rotund of stature (30% fat – only 5% less than salad cream, apparently) Ellis acknowledges he doesn’t have a naturally joyful expression, revealing its childhood origins – terrifyingly, that thing about expressions becoming fixed when the wind changes is true! Effortlessly fun, I enjoyed Ellis’ bemusement about finding friends’ new babies interesting and marvelling at his mate’s gym habits: he goes there to pick up heavy things and put them down again. Un-arguable and very funny too.
Returning for her main set, Angela delivers over an hour of comic brilliance. An irresistibly frank and likable presence, she has us willingly in the palm of her hand as she treats us to a whirlwind tour of her headspace, which includes insights into her synaesthesia, the anxiety that gives her show its name, and the experience of driving over the Alps with Rhod Gilbert, contending with both treacherous mountain roads and sexist Italians.
Along the way, the superbly affable Angela makes friends with youngest audience member 14-year-old Alex, to whom she explains teletext service Ceefax was an early attempt to invent the internet but using potatoes. She also connects with Helma, a German woman with whom she shares her enthusiasm for that language and its latently amusing vocabulary.
The hit rate of gags is consistently high, and such is Angela’s speed of delivery that we were probably treated to 50% more jokes per minute than many of her peers.
If Angela Barnes isn’t yet a “name” in your household, you’d be doing yourself a favour if you sought her out and changed that.
Angela Barnes Angst tours nationally throughout 2025.
