Nish Kumar: Your Power, Your Control review – this time it’s personal

Soho theatre, London
An account of a terrible gig opens ‘a silly window’ on the Mash Report comic’s mental health and the rise of nativism

Why is Nish Kumar such a bete noir for angry rightwingers everywhere? Everybody hates him, he cries from the stage tonight, in a show that takes stock of his life as a partisan political comic who has brown skin. Its case study is a 2019 charity gig (think “millionaires in ballrooms”) where Kumar, anti-Brexit gags blazing, had a bread roll thrown at him before being booed off stage. The incident, much embellished in the press, triggered death threats, which in turn prompted a reckoning for Kumar with his brittle mental health.

This may sound like a more sobering show than you’d expect from Kumar. But it isn’t. It’s more personal, perhaps – he’s seldom before spoken about his mental fragility, not least because (as he says here) he was totally in denial about it. But the keynote is still uproarious and self-mocking, as the 36-year-old holds himself up for relentless ridicule: as the comic self-sabotaging in front of his “pre-gout” audience; as the messianic ego fantasising his own tragic assassination; and as the shmuck trying to impress people by pretending to have read Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Save for Kumar’s opening 10 minutes, which leathers the government for its “incompetence, corruption and ideology”, and takes particular aim at the myth of Rishi Sunak’s competence, we’re not in a world of Mash Report-style topical satire. Instead, the show unspools its tale of the gig-gone-wrong and its aftermath by way of “a silly window on to something more serious” – specifically, how non-white people, public figures included, are now being screened for their supposed anti-Britishness.

The set has its less effective moments. A routine about the inanity of national anthems is over-illustrated with a surfeit of caterwauling examples. Too many jokes, no matter their subject, reach for knob-gag punchlines. Maybe that stems from an anxiety that his serious concerns might capsize the comedy – which is unwarranted, but understandable. Certainly, Kumar’s chilling argument about our slide towards nativism, and the insights he affords into life on the receiving end of death threats, will linger even after the considerable laughter subsides.

• Your Power, Your Control is touring until 17 May.