4.5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

In her new work-in-progress, French-Algerian comedian Celya AB turns the stage into a confessional diary of cultural dissonance, parental pressure, and the absurdities of modern love. Having lived in the UK for several years, she has honed a comic persona that thrives on contradiction: French yet foreign, confident yet scarred by childhood insecurities, wryly detached yet startlingly vulnerable.

The show unfolds as a patchwork of memory and revelation. Growing up, she recalls, the world seemed to conspire against her body. A Spanish teacher informed her that she possessed “the median stature of a French man”, a remark that lingers decades later. At home, her father, a plastic surgeon, offered the blunt assurance that she might be beautiful one day, if she had a nose job. What could have been trauma becomes comedy in her hands, an excavation of how girls inherit shame long before they have words for it.

Celya moves seamlessly into adulthood, charting the uneven geography of relationships in her adopted country. English boyfriends, messy entanglements, the thrill of falling for a woman in her friendship group, only to stumble on her in flagrante in a festival tent. The stories are intimate yet universal, the humour sharpened by her refusal to gloss over the pain beneath the punchlines.

One of her most provocative riffs emerges from her ambivalence about motherhood. Rather than coo over a baby, she implores the audience to picture the man that baby might grow into: the dull, oblivious 50-year-old accountant. “Think of the man, not the boy,” she warns, twisting maternal instinct into a feminist provocation. The laughter here is edged with unease, a challenge as much as a gag.

Yet her sharpest moment comes in a deceptively simple vignette. Walking home alone at night, she describes pulling on black jeans and a hoodie, dressing down into anonymity, desperate to feel safe. But her careful disguise backfires. A passing woman mistakes her for a threatening French man in a dark alleyway and flees. The line loops back to her teacher’s cruel childhood remark, landing with the double weight of humour and bitter irony.

Across the hour, Celya AB builds a mosaic of themes: body image, parental expectations, bisexual desire, the fear of motherhood, the strange estrangement of being Algerian in France and French in the UK. What ties it together is her ability to embody the contradictions—outsider and insider, victim and provocateur, French archetype and its parody.

This is comedy with bite and tenderness, a feminist reflection stitched with mischief. Still a work-in-progress, yes, but one that already reveals a performer unafraid to turn her own scars into a mirror, one that leaves her audience laughing, unsettled, and unexpectedly moved.