★★★★★

“a show of sparkling brilliance”

Let’s start with the show warning: “contains nudity and mild language”. Missing from this warning is “danger from collapse as a result of extreme laughing”.

This is not the show for you if naked bodies on stage offend your sensibilities. Garry Starr gets on with the show (or gets it all off?) from the moment he swings his chair around to face us – he’s been patiently waiting with his back to the audience as we take our seats. It’s all there – yes, I mean all the naughty bits – on full show. The audience explodes in laughter which pretty much never stops as the next 70 minutes roars past like a Southern Ocean squall.

And don’t expect any respect for the great literature of the Cream and Orange Penguin paperbacks era. Garry Starr – the creation of Australian comic Damien Warren-Smith – gallops through all the great books – everything from Hamlet (nodding to Garry’s former take on Shakespeare) to The Grapes of Wrath. The works are stacked on a bookshelf at the front of the stage, the titles projected on a screen at the back – set in a silver foil Antarctic mountain – as he pulls each one out then carelessly tosses it on the floor when that sketch moves on.

This is a show of sparkling brilliance. Garry/Damien is a master of mime, clowning, improvisation and wordplay. Part of the fun for us in the seats is the guessing game as the title appears. Will this one be a pun on the title? Just think what you might do with Moby Dick. Or will a member of the audience be hauled on stage to help connect four apparently unrelated titles?

It’s a one man show – and it’s not. It’s cleverly scripted – and it leaves so much to chance. It’s a riff on the classics, yet it is a fond recall of so many great books. It’s an extreme performance in the nude, yet it doesn’t shock. Despite all the comic potential, there isn’t a single barb. Garry the character is all the greater, because of the warmth Warren-Smith shows as a performer.

Garry has built up a following. In the queue to get into the theatre was a group to one side in penguin costumes, each carrying one of the eponymous books: a band of costumed fans like those waiting to attend a singalong performance of ‘Sound of Music’. That too proved a piece of pageantry. The performance starts even before you enter.

GARRY STARR PERFORMS EVERYTHING at Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★½

“an hour of squirm-inducing silliness you’ll want to bring all your friends to”

Recently barred from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Garry Starr is on a mission to save theatre from the pretentious establishment who make Billy Shakes boring. To achieve this, he has under an hour to pack in as many genres as possible, to show, solo, how they should really be performed.

It’s a high-energy romp and a quintessential fringe comedy show. One hour of intensely physical theatre best enjoyed after sinking one or two pints. Both to more heartily laugh at the silliness of it all and to more readily volunteer as Garry’s co-star.

Garry, the creation of Damien Warren-Smith, is endearingly eccentric with his lack of self awareness leading to comic error rather than arrogance. He is full of malapropisms – those who don’t understand the theatre are phallustines; we are told about Starr’s semenal work; and introduced to Placeidon – the god of the sea and after birth. Dressed in Elizabethan ruff and too-tight, knee-length leggings-come-breeches, Warren-Smith as Starr gives us a rendition of what Act 2 Scene 2 of Hamlet would have sounded like in Shakespeare’s day. Then, stripping down to a very small and well-stuffed jock-strap, prances about to show us contemporary dance. It is telling that the piece ends with Garry’s take on Cirque Nouveau – for this show owes more to clowns and jesters than it does to Ibsen or Chekhov.

Acclaimed director Cal McCrystal, responsible for directing an early show for The Mighty Boosh and the physical comedy in One Man, Two Guvnors, is an excellent fit for Warren-Smith’s slapstick. But the audience interaction, general lack of clothing and, at times, full frontal nudity, felt like it owed a lot to shows directed by Dr Brown, like Natalie Palamides’ Laid and Courtney Pauruoso’s Gutterplum. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given both Dr Brown and Damien Warren-Smith, the man behind the character, both trained at the Parisian clown academy Ecole Philippe Gaulier.

The show suffers from the Nanette-ification of comedy, where a set is not complete without its final act reckoning with the struggles that forged it. Here it feels contrived and out of kilter with the rest of the outrageous silliness of the rest of the show. Some comedy, particularly clowning and physical theatre, can just be unashamedly funny.

Nonetheless I was stunned when the show ended that an hour had already gone by. I would happily have kept watching whilst Starr took on kitchen-sink drama or Gilbert and Sullivan. Garry Starr’s high energy dramatics hold up a funhouse mirror to theatre making for an hour of squirm-inducing silliness you’ll want to bring all your friends to.

GARRY STARR: CLASSIC PENGUINS

Arts Theatre

★★★★★

“a show of sparkling brilliance”

GARRY STARR: CLASSIC PENGUINS

Arts Theatre

Reviewed on 3rd November 2025

by Louis Sibley

Photography by Matt Crockett (main images) Jeff Moore (outdoor images)

Previously reviewed at this venue:

Garry Starr

Garry Starr

Garry Starr

GARRY STARR PERFORMS EVERYTHING at Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★½

“an hour of squirm-inducing silliness you’ll want to bring all your friends to”

GARRY STARR PERFORMS EVERYTHING at Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 4th December 2023

by Amber Woodward

Photography by Jeromaia Detto

More Southwark Playhouse reviews:

Garry Starr Performs Everything

Garry Starr Performs Everything

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