It’s beautiful to be right here in Colchester, says Rosie Holt, “the place folks nonetheless voted Tory on Thursday”. For many comics, that wouldn’t be a boon. But it surely offers Holt one thing to work with. She’s right here, to start with, within the blue-blazered, Conservative MP character from her hit on-line movies, a cannon-fodder backbencher contorting herself to carry the celebration line. The movies, during which Holt MP lies so exhausting she confuses even herself, are nice – however her debut dwell present, at Edinburgh competition fringe two summers in the past, didn’t symbolize a completely profitable transition to the stage.
This one, known as That’s Politainment, is best: Holt feels extra snug in her personal, and her characters’, skins. It’s a reasonably standard set, with contributions from her MP alter ego, her rightwing GB Information host Harriet Langley-Swindon, and from Holt herself. Neither of the fictional characters has but developed past the two-dimensional, and – when you’re searching for selection – it’s not best that they each ship up the identical ideological impulses. However there are some droll jokes right here, akin to when her MP blames Toby Jones for the Put up Workplace scandal, or her semantic gymnastics (“we’ve modified the definition of ‘definition’”) impressed by the federal government’s decree that Rwanda is a superbly secure nation.
What I craved was one thing a bit wilder or extra surprising, to complicate the intelligent however acquainted satire of those gentle targets. And there are flashes of that, like Langley-Swindon’s flight of fanaticism when attempting to outline “woke”, a imaginative and prescient of perplexed pronouns, oat lattes and fountains frothing with males’s tears. The closing part of the present, hosted by Holt herself, is a little bit of a seize bag, with a pair of sketches (one spoofing Russell Model; one imagining Liz Truss’s interior monologue) revived from that 2022 present, and a lovely working gag in regards to the hen’s enamel nature of Labour insurance policies, to offset accusations of political partisanship.
Partisan she could also be, however – as she wonders on the finish of That’s Politainment – can Holt’s comedy profession survive the appearance of a Labour authorities? On this proof, you’d fancy her possibilities.
