Reuben Kaye: Hard To Swallow comedy review – Fearless and mesmerising
The incomparable Kaye lays into his various bêtes noires with gleeful savagery
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The impossibly statuesque Reuben Kaye stands centre stage, shrouded in a black cape, the prelude to a ferocious opening number. The cape drops to reveal an outrageously fabulous outfit, all shimmer, shine and bare arse. Backed by his tight band, this man knows how to make an entrance. There’s just time for a quick costume change into a little black number before he launches into a fiercely political set that spares no one. Kaye doesn’t do middle of the road: his delivery is fast and filthy and nothing is safe from his rapid-fire ire. In between knockout songs, he stalks the spiegeltent stage in killer heels, spitting out savage takedowns of those who dare to call themselves our leaders.
This is fearless comedy, the danger palpable, with virtually no topic off the table: the far right, his own Jewishness (only for the food, he quips), infertility, Palestine, nationalism, Charlie Kirk’s funeral, conversion therapy, even a gasp-inducing Ann Widdecombe reference. He gleefully tears down Elon Musk as a man so awful that even the paedophiles on Epstein Island reckoned he was too weird to invite. A mesmerising live presence, Reuben Kaye is a dark, compelling queer voice screaming at us to wake up and smell the fascism. You’d be a fool not to listen.
Reuben Kaye: Hard To Swallow, Assembly George Square Gardens, until 29 August, 8pm; picture: Jax Moussa.