The Other Palace

This review is from 2025. An Oak Tree returns yet again for 2026 as part of a season at The Other Palace curated by producer Francesca Moody. Guests this time include Hammed Animashaun, Bessie Carter, Rosalie Craig, Sacha Dhawan, George Fouracres, Clare Perkins, Tom Mothersdale and Gemma Whelan. New shoots keep growing from Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, its legend quietly bubbling away for 20 years and its strange, unsettling magnificence never wavering. First performed in 2005, it was a solid rejection of stuffy plays where the actors say their memorised words each night in the same way. Instead, every performance has a different actor performing alongside experimental theatremaker Crouch, now almost 400 of them, including Hugh Bonneville, Mike Myers and Alanis Morrissette. They come on stage, follow Crouch’s instructions, take on the part of a grieving father and generally look very nervous while doing it. The actor has never seen or read the play before, and the audience doesn’t know which star guest they’ll get. For this twentieth anniversary production, the list of actors eager to submit themselves to this grief-laden improv show is impressive: David Tennant and Indira Varma are on the roster, while on press night it was Jessie Buckley pulled up from the front row.The performer is instructed very precisely by Crouch what to do and say. She is Andy, a middle aged man, grieving the recent loss of his daughter who was killed by a driver. The driver was a stage hypnotist –...

Slapstick comedy sensation Starr attempts to perform every single Penguin Classic novel – from Frankenstein to The Grapes of Wrath – over the course of one joyously bonkers 70-minute show. Do not expect to learn that much about English literature. After several West End stints the show returns as part of a season of work from producer Francesca Moody at The Other Palace.

Sequels are a relative rarity in theatre, for all sorts of reasons. But after spoofing classic Christmas move Home Alone two years’ back, the creative team behind The Other Palace’s Homo Alone – that’s Jodie Prenger and Neil Hurst – clearly couldn’t resist the open goal of spoofing its arguably even better sequel. Yes, Kevin McAllister (Thomas John Stocks) will indeed be lost in New York (aka ‘the gayest place on Earth’) for Homo Alone 2: Yikes We Did It Again, which is basically a very naughty parod of the film, Trump cameo and all.

This review is from the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe. Feeling Afraid… plays The Other Palace in 2026, with Steven Webb replacing Samuel Barnett. Somewhat disorientating at a festival full of actual stand-up comics, Marcelo Dos Santos’s monologue ‘Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen’ is a play structured like a stand-up set, with Samuel Barnett’s neurotic gay comedian protagonist working up a routine apparently based upon his character’s real love life. It’s framed around his relationship with a nice American man, whose personal details are chopped and changed as the show wears on, but who is always extremely hench (I learned the phrase ‘cum gutters’!) and extremely affable, to the point that he somewhat freaks Barnett’s character out - all the more so when he discovers that his new boyfriend has a medical condition that stops him laughing. The meat of the show is the comedian’s suspicion – and, indeed, fear – of the stability the American offers, and his constant indulgence in largely depressing casual sex on the side. The title comes from his innate, self-loathing fatalism: he doesn’t allow himself to enjoy life because he’s already convinced the worst will happen. Maybe the self-loathing gay fuckup who is also a comedian trades in a few tropes, but the eventual problem he faces – that it infuriates him his boyfriend doesn’t laugh at any of his jokes, even though doing so might literally kill him – is a pleasingly absurdist one.  It’s funny, and it takes...