Katherine Ryan Live review in Doncaster by Rob Johnson
Much has happened in the world of Katherine Ryan since her last visit to Doncaster in 2022. She gave birth to her third child, became embroiled in the Russell Brand controversy, and has been selling out venues across the country as part of her Battleaxe tour. What hasn’t changed, however, is her acerbic wit and assured onstage persona…
As is tradition when playing the Doncaster Dome, Ryan begins by stating how weird the glorified sports hall is as a venue. She describes it as a “wide venue” before warning the audience that this is not a euphemism for her vagina, despite all the children she has had (“I have children like a drunk person eats chicken nuggets”). After jokily reassuring the audience that it’s normal to take a few minutes to adjust to how pretty she is in real life, Ryan launches into a series of stinging rebukes aimed at her husband indeed and all men – “I love men, I just think you’re very stupid based on how you look and act”. She ponders the difference between women cheating (“We’ve had it planned for months”) to men cheating (“Men can leave the house with the best intentions and then find themselves sat in the lap of a sex worker by lunchtime”) before offering the stark conclusion that “If dildos learned how to bleed a radiator, men would be obsolete”. Quite.
While this is well-worn material for Ryan, crucially it’s very funny and it never feels like men can’t be in on the joke too. Her attitude clearly comes from a place of love (albeit tinged with exasperation) and Ryan can be just as scathing in her assessment of women too.
Ryan then moves on to another of her favourite topics – motherhood. As a father of a baby daughter, Ryan’s observation that her husband’s hobby (golf in this case) takes five hours and yet her ‘hobby’ is merely going to the toilet alone hit closer to home than I’d have liked. She goes on to question what the golf course has that she doesn’t (“18 holes” being her hilarious response) before finishing the first section of the show with a 10-minute diatribe detailing the fallout from the Russell Brand accusations. This is Ryan at her searing best and it is often the moments in which she is being the most serious that are the most effective.
The second part of the set is more interactive with Ryan reading out text messages sent from audience members during the interval. One particularly troubling revelation about a woman, her cheating husband and her younger sister takes a dark turn when the man in question literally runs out of the arena when the message flashes up on screen. A visibly flustered Ryan eventually takes this in her stride and on reflection it’s exactly the kind of electric moment that only live comedy can provide.
After two 45-minute sets, Ryan wraps up and elegantly waltzes off in her sparkly ballgown to rapturous applause from the Doncaster audience – a great night of comedy from one of the UK’s most confident live performers.
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