Fair Play Cabaret 
Quorn Grange Hotel, Leicestershire (GFTU Education Trust) 

 
DRIVING across the Leicestershire Wolds to Quorn, I narrowly avoid a deer caught in my headlights. It’s fitting that an evening of exhilarating chaos begins with an adrenaline rush.

Fair Play Cabaret opens with a set by compere Mark Thomas. Warming up a small and slightly inhibited audience takes considerable confidence and 40 years’ experience of stagecraft. Thomas breaks the fourth wall, talks about “workshopping” an apparently underappreciated punchline and urges us to rearrange the seating to make performers feel “embraced.” It works brilliantly. 

As funny and informative as his much-missed Channel 4 documentaries, Thomas’s act lurches through a range of themes — the vast acreage of land consumed by golf, an airport runway delay, anxieties about the Starmer government and an appearance at a literary festival in Lewes, in the slot before Andrea Leadsom.