Sooz KempnerMega Drive

Hh

VENUE: PBH’s Free Fringe @ Globe Bar

TIME: 1pm – 2pm, 3–25 Aug, not

14, 21

TICKETS: FREE

Even if you share Sooz Kempner’s passion for Sega video games of the ‘90s, it’s questionable if you’ll find too much to entertain you in this hard-striving but ill-conceived show. From the premise that her many hours spent playing games as a teenager stunted her social development, but fuelled her “Mega Drive” ambition, the comic and singer suggests that her life is one of giddy highs immediately followed by crushing lows.

A viral sensation earlier this year after posting the bizarre tale of her former job as a Christina Aguilera impersonator, she was nevertheless quickly brought back to earth with a bump, just as she was in the moment

David Correos: Better Than I Was The Last Time H

VENUE: Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose

TIME: 10:15pm – 11:15pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug

TICKETS: £9 – £10

David Correos should not be trusted with knives. After downing half a pint of red wine at the top of the show, little goes to plan. Logic is thrown aside with an unused chicken prop, as Correos sellotapes a bread knife to his face of her greatest professional triumph: making her West End debut at the English National Opera. Affording commentary on these personal peaks and troughs, she interacts with two video manifestations of her competing inner self, Good Sooz and Bad Sooz, the former a Scientology-enabled wellspring of encouragement, the latter an undermining bitch queen. And inbetween all this self-analysis, she interjects her critiques of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and other Sega games, their regressive, underlying politics as great a source of humour as their outdated graphics and lack of relative technical sophistication.

Additionally, there’s another tangent about the hymns that Kempner sang at school which testify to her impressive pipes. But the most amusing aspect remains her mockery of highly dubious games like Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. Bolted onto such assured cynicism, the self-immolation feels indulgent and rather skated through. ✏︎

Jay Richardson

and stumbles around the stage yelling through the pain. This is not unlike watching a breakdown.

Better Than I Was The Last Time falls severely in the shadow of his previous show, The Correos Effect, in which the New Zealand comedian ramped up the energy from one to 10 over the course of the hour, resulting in a bike-pumpbutt-plug trick that left audience members gagging, not always from laughter. “Is this better than my last show?” he asks an audience member who came last year. “No,” they say frankly, and it’s worse that you can tell they’re not even angry, just disappointed.

Correos does this show under the guise of finding his “comedic voice” but it’s clear he’s far from locating it. Somewhere amid the desperation are a few decent sets about going to the Philippines for his circumcision and his more recent failed audition for a TV show in New Zealand. But he runs out of material half an hour in, checks his phone for the countdown five times and by the end literally begs us to go.

“Please leave,” he pleads, as he buys the last few seeminglyendless minutes of his set by dancing in his pants, a stray testicle poking out. “Please.” It’s almost so bad it’s funny. Instead, we scramble out of the theatre a bit worried about what we’re leaving behind. ✏︎ Kate

Wyver