Boris: World King will run at the Pleasance Courtyard, 1:45pm every day until 31 August.

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We’ll use this blog post to collate all the press reviews we get. So check back. Fingers crossed…

Press

The Times (Dominic Maxwell)
**** “Written with equal parts flourish and focus… it nails both Johnson’s blustery charm and the steely way he uses it”
Full review (Paywall)

London Evening Standard (Veronica Lee)
**** “David Benson is uncannily accurate… A very amusing show, with a bite in its tail, that surely deserves a London transfer.”
Full review

Broadway Baby (Rory Mackenzie)
***** “A giddy, silly and savagely satirical delight. Impeccable performances match impeccable writing in this unique take on one of Britain’s most unique figures.”
Full review

The Times (Keiza Dugdale)
“The sharpest show I’ve seen on this year’s Fringe. The writing is beautiful and the delivery so exacting.”
Full article (paywall)

The Guardian (Mark Lawson)
“A comic but accurate account of the rise and pratfalls of a politican whose career feels uniquely suited to slapstick dramatisation.”
Full article

The Stage
**** “David Benson does a superb impersonation of Johnson, nailing his wild, stuttering mannerisms, and Crawshaw’s script cleverly allows BJ to hang himself with his own desperate need to please. A smart and unsettling piece.”
Full review

British Theatre Guide (Keith McKenna)
**** “Benson as Boris combines a genial selfish charm with just the hint of a cruel, conniving intelligence below the surface… This fine entertainment deserves to be seen by everyone.”
Full review

Frowning Magazine (US)
“Nothing short of hysterical. A bold political satire… truly the king of the Pleasance Courtyard!”
Full review

The Student Newspaper
**** “Very amusing and highly recommended”
Full review

The Independent
“Benson is highly amusing as Boris… comically portraying a persona before effectively skewering it.”
Full review

Edinburgh Evening News
**** “A Buster Keaton-inspired piece of slapstick.”
Full review

Commentators

Gyles Brandreth
“A sensational five-star performance… David Benson & Alice McCarthy are quite brilliant in Tom Crawshaw’s sharp & hilarious bio-drama about Boris Johnson” (via Twitter and Twitter)

Kezia Dugdale (Scottish Labour Leader) (in The Times)
“The sharpest show I’ve seen on this year’s Fringe. The writing is beautiful and the delivery so exacting.”
Full article (paywall)

Iain Dale (LBC Radio)
“A rip-roaring hour… if you can get tickets, this is a show not to miss.”
Full post

Blogs
chrisontheatre.wordpress.com
“David Benson’s performance as Boris is teriffic, as is Alice McCarthy… Every man and his dog is fighting to say how great this play is, so they don’t really need my help repeating my endorsements.”
Full blogpost

gailbishop.wordpress.com
“A brilliantly funny show, filled with latin, Boris bikes, wiff-waff and tomfoolery. This level of clowning and mimicry takes skill in order for it not to look too staged.”
Full blogpost

julieraby.com
**** “There is much to keep the audience entertained… extremely polished performances.”
Full blogpost

Twitter reaction

@UnofficialReviews
**** “Hugely frolicsome! What a character to embody and done so accurately.”

@TheTheatreGuide
**** “A satirical masterclass.”

@frances_shoal
“Brilliant! Haven’t had a good laugh like that in a long time. Gaeat performances all round!”

@CharlieRoss99
“In Edinburgh? Go see #borisworldking the hilarious dissection of Boris Johnson. A must see!”

@jgslater
“Brilliant satire on @BorisJohnson quest for world dominance”

@PetrieOut
“A MUST SEE show at the Edinburgh festival.”

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If you’re a director early in your career, with a love of comedy and the Edinburgh Fringe, this is the job for you.

Performance dates are:

• Sat 4th July: London preview
• 20th-26th July: Buxton Fringe
• 5th-31st August:  Edinburgh Fringe

London rehearsals will take place for just under two weeks, Monday to Saturday daytimes, between Wednesday 24th June and Saturday 4th July. There’ll be further rehearsals the week the show is in Buxton, and you may be asked to lead some catch-up rehearsals between the various runs of the show.

Fire a copy of your CV over to work@threescompany.co.uk, with a cover letter, and we’ll get in touch.

Give us a shout with any questions, and we’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Boris: World King sees the Mayor of London (and MP for Uxbridge, and Telegraph columnist, and Cabinet member) make the most of his summer recess by presenting a play about his life at the Edinburgh Fringe – all in a bid to win the Fosters Comedy Award.

It’s our latest collaboration between award-winning writer Tom Crawshaw and award-winning director Yaz Al-Shaater, following 5-star Edinburgh hits Not The Messiah, Auditorium and Later Showers.

Cast to be announced.

You can catch the show at Underground Venues (Buxton Fringe) and the Pleasance Courtyard (Edinburgh Fringe) this July and August. There will also be a London preview to be announced.

I’ve spent my life watching the Pythons, writing about the Pythons and (both deliberately and, all too often accidentally) writing like the Pythons. But, like many of their newer fans, I feel incredibly distant from these historical comedy inspirations, who finished touring their live shows before I was born, and have only appeared on stage together once since.

Even for those original fans who experienced the Pythons in their true, groundbreaking context, the chances of having seen them live are vanishingly slim. Their stage tour had limited dates, and these all occurred before the greater fame brought by their film hits.

For the vast majority then, the Pythons are purely a screen phenomenon: a bunch of eternally young men from the 70s endlessly high-kicking, fish-slapping, coconut-clopping and Messiah-declaring their way across YouTube and DVD box sets for our delight. In this context, the prospect of a live appearance (by all of them who are not currently pushing up the daisies) seems ludicrously exciting.

But are we right to be so excited? For a start, despite it not being explicitly stated, I feel it’s unlikely the 145,000 fans attending their 10-date run can expect any new material. The team have acknowledged that most of their audience will be there to see the stuff they know, but even if they weren’t, it would surely be better to stick to it.

Monty Python are remembered for their best sketches and the best moments from their best films. To avoid cries that they have lost their talents and are now just old men trying to be comedians, literally nothing less than the funniest sketch ever written would suffice.

Originality and surprise were always key ingredients of the winning Python formula, ingredients people are always looking for with comedy. But surely there’s a problem of how to achieve these when your entire audience know what you’re going to say before you say it.

John Cleese remembers playing to complete silence at the Hollywood Bowl in 1982, before discovering the audience were too busy mouthing along to the sketches to laugh. This was the first time the Pythons had not been laugh-out-loud funny since their first TV recording, in front of pensioners who thought they’d come to see an actual circus – could London’s O2 arena in July 2014 be the third?

Add to this the constant swathe of people complaining about how miniscule the Pythons will appear from the lofty, yet expensive, perches, probably about 10- minutes sound -delay from the stage.

Certainly, seeing the Flying Circus stars in a dingy 50-seat upstairs pub room would be an infinitely more rewarding experience for all involved, but this would require ticket prices of £25,000 each. The O2 arena is perhaps the only place able to deliver retired comedy Gods, with the fees they expect to bother re-forming, at a price that pretty much anyone can at least afford.

But what does this say about live comedy? Are all these people, like with so many large-scale commercial shows, just paying for name recognition rather than the content? It seems, no one is expecting a groundbreaking show, superior performances or new material, they are simply expecting Pythons. No line that’s said will be more important than the person saying it. Does the Python reunion typify the worst of live comedy – designed to play to as many people as possible and trade entirely on celebrity status?

Tempting though that is, my feeling would rather be that it is a striking illustration of what makes live comedy unique and special. Film and TV may be the perfect medium to craft and tell a joke the exact way you want to, and deliver it conveniently and cheaply to the most people possible. The one advantage live comedy has is it can put you in the same space as that joke and the person telling it, making it immediate and making the audience an essential part of it.

This desire for live experiences, simply because they are live and immediate should be encouraged. The desire for immediacy is what drives live comedy and will allow it to survive in the face of its easily available screen-based equivalent.

As well as celebrating the work of five comedy legends next July, the Python reunion can also wave the flag for all live comedy – for the act of simply paying money to go and be in the same room as a person being funny, whether they mention dead parrots or not.

I’ll be there, to see my comedy idols and unashamedly mouth along all the sketches with the rest of them. But I hope some of us 145,000 will pop along to see some unknown comedians in a dingy upstairs pub room soon afterwards – after all, they might be the superstar-comedians-reuniting-to-pay-off-their-mortgage of the future.

This article first appeared on Chortle on 09/12/13

The time is finally here. After receiving crowd-funding through Kickstarter back in April and filming in September, our first ever sitcom, in collaboration with BrotherBrother, has now launched online.

Missing Something is an energy-packed web-based sitcom about lost twenty-something Rachel and her bizarre friends. Each 4-minute episode builds an increasingly complex web of plots, connections and schemes – as well as more allusions and references than you can shake a Pooh stick at.

The episodes are being released every Tuesday and Thursday from now until Christmas at missingsomething.tv Head there now to take a look!

The series is directed by Yaz and his brother Haz (their secret brother Taz is not involved). It’s written by Leila Sykes (from Smooth Faced Gentlemen and The World’s Greatest Walking Tour Of Edinburgh) and our own Tom Crawshaw. It stars many Three’s Company regulars including Fran Binefa (from The Importance Of Being Frank), Ashlea Kay (from TIOBF and TWGWTOE), Scott Wilson-Besgrove (from None Of The Above and TWGWTOE), Amr El-Bayoumi (from Auditorium) and George Telfer (from Not The Messiah).

Have a watch of the episodes now – and keep up to date with the Missing Something Facebook and Twitter. We hope you enjoy it!

Leading new writing theatre in London – Theatre 503 – have picked up the show and will be co-producing it for one week from 7-11 January. With a strong artistic policy and a great track record of West End transfers and key revivals, this is a great step for our latest new play.

Following this, Not The Messiah will be heading to Belfast and Derby as part of a mini UK tour. In Derby, it will play the 250 seat Guildhall Theatre while in Belfast it is part of the acclaimed Out To Lunch Festival happening around the city. It’s in Belfast on 14 January and Derby 16 January.

For those of you who weren’t able to see the show in Edinburgh (where is got five 5-star reviews!) we hope one of London, Derby and Belfast might be near enough for you to be able to come along. There might yet be more performances of this popular show, starring the wonderful George Telfer, so watch this space.

Theatre 503, London, 7-11 January

– details and tickets here

Out To Lunch Festival, Belfast, 14 January

– details here

Guildhall Theatre, Derby, 16 January

– details and tickets here

Joss is a professional composer with a wide experience of musical styles who will be turning his skills at tailoring music to any mood to this fun theatrical work. You can check out some of his previous composition work here.

Plane Of Existence if a philosophical musical comedy in which three unlikely thieves flee the country on a plane to Mexico, only to discover three people in Business Class are writing a musical about them. Tom will be writing the book and lyrics with Joss composing and Three’s Company hopes to produce the finished product very soon. Expect an all-singing, all-dancing, all-philosophising musical comedy extravaganza like none you’ve seen before. And also some bananas.

In 1972, during an impromptu TV appearance with jazz singer George Melly, Monty Python star Graham Chapman, rather drunkenly, came out publicly as the first gay comedian in British history. This casual announcement caused no small amount of outrage – homosexuality had only been decriminalised three years previously and it was far from universally accepted. 41 years on, our attitudes have changed: the recent British Attitudes Survey revealed four-fifths of people now have no objection to homosexual relationships, and same sex marriage is soon to become law. But has the comedy world kept pace with this social change?

Certainly, directly homophobic jokes are no longer accepted by audiences. Where you might have had a few non-ironic, ‘come over a little queer’, innuendos in working men’s clubs in the 1970s, these are now restricted to the school playground. But homosexuality still remains to some extent a taboo and therefore a basis – if not a target – for comedy. Consider, for instance, how a comedian can get a laugh out of allusion to a homosexual act or homosexual attraction, which wouldn’t be possible with the heterosexual equivalent. Comedians can also continue to spout gay-innuendo, as long as it is done from behind the mask of a character (cf Al Murray) or irony (cf Jimmy Carr). In other words, we as a nation no longer think homosexuality is wrong but are happy to laugh at it, provided we believe the comedy’s creators share our enlightened views.

Chapman’s coming out in 1972 was closely followed by the première of Are You Being Served – perhaps the source of Britain’s most famous comic gay character. Though now dated, Mr Humphries camp behaviour crops up later in Gimme Gimme Gimme, Benidorm and Little Britain, while the trope of a closeted or secretly gay man resurfaces frequently, for instance Fraiser’s Gil Chesterton, The Simpsons’ Smithers and Ted & Ralph from The Fast Show. On the live circuit, numerous all-male sketch groups coax wild laughter out of subtle suggestions of attraction between the actual cast members and their attempted or successful sexual advances (passionate snogs in male sketch groups are so frequent it’s a wonder anyone is still able to believe they are unplanned).

A reasonable question is whether this is something we should be concerned about. I would not for one second suggest the people making the above work hate gay people or necessarily hold even slightly homophobic views. After all, comedy’s role is merely to play on taboos, it is society that is responsible for creating them. Comedy reflects the world and its prejudices and, if we don’t like what we see, this is just the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass (to quote Oscar Wilde – perhaps the world’s most famously ill-fated homosexual comedian). One could easily claim that playing on gay taboos does not involve saying homosexuality is wrong, merely that it historically exists outside of the mainstream.

But doesn’t comedy have a duty to question and to change the world, rather than simply playing to its basest interests? After all, no self-respecting comedian would tell racist jokes, even if their audience happened to consist entirely of BNP activists who genuinely enjoyed them. Isn’t laughing at a situation predicated on homosexuality saying, in some way, that to be gay is somehow slightly ridiculous – not wrong or evil – but somehow lesser, not ordinary, not completely sensible.

There is perhaps a hint of macho culture at work – a culture often accused of pervading comedy – where the jokes of the playground are rejected but their underlying narrative is accepted and played on. It has been frequently noted that men playing women gets laughs but women playing men does not, and that this may be down to the gender-power-play at work. Perhaps the same process exists when a straight man ‘plays gay’. Certainly the reverse wouldn’t be funny – the heterosexuality of a straight man, in itself, is never made the basis for a joke. Doesn’t the mere fact of this suggest something not entirely comfortable at work behind homosexuality’s portrayal in comedy?

It is also interesting to contrast how frequently, how well and from how early on drama – on stage and screen – has tackled the real life issues of homosexuality, gay life and gay culture, and has succeeded in presenting numerous three-dimensional gay characters. Perhaps comedy is starting to do this, although its tendency toward stereotype makes it not best placed for the challenge. But surely, through satire, it is perfectly positioned to tackle the existing power-play between gay-straight relations and the place of gay stereotypes in culture. Where are the stand-up routines and the sketches poking fun at the casually accepted cultural view of homosexuality as effeminate or butch, transgressive, ridiculous or naughty?

Graham Chapman did much to advance gay rights, mainly by living in the public eye as a non-stereotypical, and successful, gay man. But his comedy work with the Pythons made as much comedy hay from ‘poofs’ as anyone else. Perhaps it’s time for comedy to take a more active approach to gay representation – to stop meeting expectations and start setting them. If homosexuality has become a cheap laugh and an easy target, why not take aim at the harder target – comedy itself.

Not The Messiah opens in London on Tuesday 22nd October and will run at the Leicester Square Theatre until the 26th. Just five chances to see it in London. Although we’re working on other dates across the country if you can’t make it there.

Here’s some news and links as we run up to the performance week:

– Tom Crawshaw wrote a piece about Graham Chapman and the treatment of homosexuality in comedy for the Chortle website. You can read it here.

– Tickets are selling fast at the Leicester Square box office – you can buy yours by clicking here.

– As a reward for reading the Three’s Company blog (and we hid it down here to make sure you are actually reading it) we’d like to offer you an exclusive 2for1 offer, which is available for either the 22nd or 23rd October performances. Just enter “parrot” in the ‘promotion code’ box and you’ll get two tickets for the price of one.

– See an interview with George Telfer on Waffle TV here…

– Get a crash course on Monty Python from this blog post…

The shoot is going fabulously well. Loads of wonderful footage. Huge thanks to everyone who helped make it happen. Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes snap taken by Dan Marsden:

Anyway, read all about our extras opportunities over on our Missing Something blog »