JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
Sketch Off Final
Leicester Square Festival, London
DESPITE the crisis in the arts, Britain has a never-ending supply of fresh weirdos. Some come straight from their university improv clubs, and some are doing their recovery in public after a year of being brutalised at infamous French clowning school Gaulier.
And some are here because their anarchic spirit allows them to belong nowhere else.
And many end up in the heats of Sketch Off, a competition dominated by character comedians, with the odd sketch act who surprise everyone by actually winning on occasion, like last year’s Burger + a Pint, who reprise their joyously stupid skits here while the judges make up their minds.
JAN WOOLF is beguiled by the tempting notion that Freud psychoanalysed Hitler in a comedy that explores the vulnerability of a damaged individual
TOM STONE sings the praises of one of the oldest open-air festivals in Britain
MARY CONWAY applauds the success of Beth Steel’s bitter-sweet state-of-the-nation play
MARY CONWAY revels in the Irish American language and dense melancholy of O’Neill’s last and little-known play


