DREAMWEAVERS

Soho Theatre

★★★

“a solid sketch show full of silly stuff”

Imagine a machine that puts your dreams on display in the middle of Soho for a hundred or so greedy audience members to peruse and cackle at over a pint. Sounds like a nightmare? Well Siblings Comedy are pitching it as a night out at the theatre!

A colander adorned with coloured fairy lights sits on a stool in the centre of the stage in front of a rack full of lab coats. We’re about to become participants in a clinical trial, with some attendees ominously asked to sign NDAs as they take their seats. The colander is actually a dream reading machine, which the awkward and bumbling scientist Gargle (Marina Bye) has been developing for years. He’s interrupted repeatedly in his introduction by the chaotic sound (Charlie Beveridge) and lighting (Lily Woodford-Lewis) sequence advertising his invention with the gravitas usually reserved for movie trailers. Gargle is supported in his mission by an aggressively chipper intern (Maddy Bye), a hapless long-term work experiencer whose main responsibilities are to bring Gargle back from distracted rants about his personal life and stop him requesting that someone on the front row get him a Five Guys.

Together, this dynamic duo run the clinical trial, sending the helmet to various audience members to reveal what’s inside their sleepy subconscious. Old favourites like not knowing your lines feature alongside whackier examples like a monarch deciding whether to behead or bed her jesters. Many audience members get to have their dreams ‘read’, but are mostly not asked to actively participate. The two lucky attendees who are invited on stage are given a deserved and hearty round of applause for managing to dance with the cumbersome and ill-behaved helmet on.

A rat turned tech freelancer gets a few opportunities to jump in verbally, but it’s just the two writers and performers of Siblings Comedy (real life sisters!) holding fort on stage under Dan Wye’s direction. Their rapport and comic timing as character actors is proven to be fine-tuned as they jump from sketch to sketch, bringing particular absurd hilarity to a pair of squabbling religious healers from the Deep South. Laughs are built up from Gargle’s consistent mispronunciations and the pair’s use of stupidity to argue with stupidity, and the song-writing is impressive in its pacey stacking of jokes. But for a show with the infinite world of dreaming at its fingertips – and a promise of the surreal – it erred on the side of predictable. You could see the cruder punchlines from a mile off, particularly the ones about unexpected appearances from Grandma. ‘Corpsing’ was relied on a little too soon and too frequently, so that in a few instances it felt like we were waiting for them to stop laughing, rather than the other way around.

It’s a solid sketch show full of silly stuff, and navigated confidently by the cast, but for a show about subconscious illusions there’s something truly bizarre missing.

DREAMWEAVERS

Soho Theatre

Reviewed on 25th February 2026

by Jessica Hayes

Photography by Dylan Woodley

DREAMWEAVERS

★★★½

“this little production still packs a gutsy punch”

Director Prime Isaac sets out their stall early in Bitch Boxer, confining all the action to the ring. Partly this is practical – a ring is bulky and the Arcola studio small – but it also tells its own tale.

Chloe (Jodie Campbell) is a fighter. Even when she’s not boxing, she’s fighting. Her whole life she has put up two fists first and asked questions later.

In case the message still isn’t clear, designer Hazel Low has set up a punch bag in the corner made up – cleverly – of old jeans and shirts, like a doner kebab of compressed cast-offs. Chloe fights everywhere she goes; it is the stuff of her life.

The suggestion that she refashioned her hobby into her attitude aged 11 when her mother left doesn’t entirely convince. But as we meet her years later, Chloe’s motivation is clear-eyed.

She has just lost her dad and her coach. He told her, more than once, you’ve got to fight for the things you love Chloe.

Yes, Dad.

She misses him endlessly.

Meanwhile, a small piece of history is happening round the corner from her Leytonstone home. It’s 2012 and the world’s sporting elite is converging on Stratford where women’s boxing will feature in the Olympics for the first time.

This is Chloe’s destiny now, her one shot at glory, and she has a reason to focus, punishing herself with a gruelling schedule. Burying her hurt beneath fresh bruises.

It’s tempting to call the play a one-hander but that would be to the detriment of the combinations that Jodie Campbell expertly delivers throughout this very physical production.

She works hard – jab, jab, cross, hook. She keeps her head defended and her emotional carapace intact, but the glimpses we do get – at home with tender girlfriend Jamie for example – reveal a sweet young woman, brittle but not broken, grieving but not knowing it yet.

Campbell’s performance is full of charm and swagger even when she’s coming closest to meeting the demands of the play’s overwrought title. Bitchy, maybe, but never a bitch.

So when she’s in the ring, fighting for the championship – energised by Jessie Addinall’s inventive lighting design – we’re rooting for her, not just in this particular contest but in life, which is tougher.

Charlie Josephine’s streetwise script fails to ask the hard questions and there’s an inevitable over-reliance on boxing analogies. But to give that tendency one more round, this little production still packs a gutsy punch.

Tag Archives: thespyinthestalls

DREAMWEAVERS

★★★

Soho Theatre

DREAMWEAVERS

Soho Theatre

★★★

“a solid sketch show full of silly stuff”