Two Edinburgh Shows Mock Comedy Critics as Snobs
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- Andrew Doherty wrote the fringe folk-horror spoof Reviewers Welcome … to Die! after receiving a three-star review for his 2024 show Sad Gay Aids Play, despite critical praise for his debut; the show stars 'Felix Chatelier,' a critic tormented by demons into redemption.
- Adam Riches performs The Critic's Way as 'Caliban Monroe,' a swaggering, Scottish-accented comedy critic who claims to have invented star ratings and presents a remaindered treatise he calls 'the 'tique,' and who is 'out of a job' after a target of his review hits back.
- Brian Logan, the Guardian theatre critic writing the piece, notes critics 'get off lightly' in Doherty's show, which targets 'thin-skinned artists bearing grudges' as much as reviewers themselves.
- The two shows join a documented sub-genre of art depicting critics as figures of ridicule, including Sheridan, Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound, the horror film/play Theatre of Blood, Russell Kane's novel, Charlotte Runcie's novel, and Sarah Kane's Cleansed — whose torturer is named after real-life critic Jack Tinker.
- Logan's piece also frames both shows as engaging with a changing climate in which 'speech is neurotically policed' and 'objective judgment and the single authoritative voice' are, in his words, 'critically out of fashion.'
- Logan rates each show a self-deprecating three stars but concludes the combined verdict on comedy critics reads as 'ridicule (fair enough) but perhaps grudging affection too' — 'like a four.'
Why it matters: Doherty's show was directly provoked by a single three-star review, illustrating how critical verdicts can become the engine of the art that follows; Logan's framing also positions the two fringe shows as artifacts of a wider shift in which the authority of the named critic is being staged, satirized, and eroded from inside the Edinburgh festival itself.
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