Fatiha El-Ghorri, a Taskmaster graduate and rising standup star, brings her Cockney Stacking Doll show to Leicester Square Theatre, London. The comic delivers gags about her life and neighbourhood with choice descriptions and brutal punchlines, drawing much of her comic power from the contrast between her kindly-seeming hijab-clad appearance and her gobby East End standup.
El-Ghorri, a British Moroccan Muslim from Hackney, recounts growing up getting mugged three times a day and learning how to handle herself. Her touring show offers a tour of her world: her divorces and online dating, her family, encounters on the buses and streets of London, all addressed with a blunt lack of sentimentality and a robust sense of her own ridiculousness.
The show may be over-reliant on the brutal punchline, with many gags concluding with threats like 'you fink I’m playin’ wiv you, bruv?' or 'they punched him in the fucking face'. El-Ghorri retorts in her Ted Talk section that she’s had to be tough to get where she is, where so few people like her are invited to be. There’s plenty of wit here, including her choice description of the Broadway Market neighbourhood as now all 'kefir, lidos and polyamory'.
Cockney Stacking Doll lacks discernible structure, more an hour of assorted and relatable jokes than a coherent show. El-Ghorri forgets her lines at one point and spends the final third counting down her remaining minutes, filling them with gags about her nieces and Bethnal Green’s low-rent McDonald’s. She has a persuasive excuse for the memory lapses, having recently undergone forced menopause after cancer surgery. The trips to her gynaecologist are recreated in characteristically in-yer-face fashion, in a show that celebrates her journey and confirms her as an earthy and endearing voice of the not yet wholly gentrified East End.
