Kate Cheka: A Messiah Comes review – barbed jokes and trenchant anecdotes | Stage

Should Kate Cheka be saving the world – or performing comedy? She grew up with a messiah complex, thanks to her feminist, socialist mum and an absentee dad serving in the Tanzanian government. This is a woman reared to make the world a better place, so what’s she doing telling jokes on stage – and winning 2023’s prestigious Funny Women award, no less?

Well, there was once a time – if you can believe it, Gen Z’ers – when we thought art might save the world. Maybe Cheka has come among us to be political comedy’s salvation? Her debut touring show isn’t the finished article, but it showcases a comic unafraid to combine the personal and the polemical, in occasionally provocative ways.

Cheka takes that combination so far and no further, mind you, in a show that is recognisably a calling card – one of those maiden solo hours that aims simply to introduce an act, and their comedy, to an audience. So we get a potted Cheka biography: reared in south London then Wiltshire by a single mum; bisexual but fatally compelled to date white men; committed to the revolution, but slightly more committed to fun. There are childhood tales advertising the oddness of having an African politician for a dad, featuring his unusual election merch, and an anecdote about a queer arts residency in Poland that sends up adult Kate’s chronic singledom.

It’s not so hard, given Cheka’s life, to intertwine this material with politics, which she does to varying degrees of success – but always with enthusiasm and charm – throughout. Her eat-the-rich rewrite of Do They Know It’s Christmas? is agitprop of a first-base variety, about which Cheka seems justifiably sheepish. Her account of struggling to find an agent after her Funny Women win is trenchant if not comical. But there are also teasingly barbed and clever jokes about Meghan and Harry, and about the Titan disaster that drowned several wealthy submariners in 2023. I both bridled at that gag’s cruelty, and delighted at its smarts. More of that, more subversive thinking in tandem with Cheka’s obvious charisma and comic craft, and political comedy may yet have found its new messiah.