REVIEW: This Time is Different

©️Holli Xue

ZHOU Ning probably picked the worst possible night to perform. On 14 August, with wildfires burning across England and Wales, the government pushed an emergency alert to millions of phones. In a room of about 80 people, that meant an average of three sirens per phone over a single hour. Most performers would have lost the room. Ning folded it into the show and nailed it, which tells us most of the uniqueness about her solo performance: awkwardness is material, not an interruption.

This Time is Different arrives at Riverside Studios as the third outing of a show developed through sold-out works in progress at Theatre Deli and Camden People's Theatre. Ning introduces herself through her own name, the 'Ning' in good "morning" and good "evening", and that small joke sets the intimate register for her hour: intimate, deadpan and faintly apologetic. She came to comedy sideways, via years of mastering musicianship in Beijing, following her album, all before she became a rising-star comedian in London.

The staging is stand-up plain. A mic, a keyboard at the side, and a projection at the back carrying her lyrics. The lighting changes occasionally during the show, mostly following her between the stand and the keyboard. She wears black throughout: long-sleeved top, sporty trousers, trainers, and round glasses that read bookish, which is a good joke itself against an hour that opens in London's pansexual dating scene.

The spine is an HPV diagnosis and Ning's attempt to trace it. She moved back to London three years ago carrying a bad breakup from China, and set about getting under someone to get over someone: Feeld, Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, a rule against sleeping with anyone twice, sex reclassified as physical exercise, and never staying over. What she finds instead is her own sensitivity to rejection, an estranged family, a mother's sacrifices, the flat impossibility of being queer and legible to relatives in mainland China, and the fact of turning thirty years old.

Roughly half of the show is music, and her songs are outstanding and touch the audience. Ning is a genuinely confident musician. She plays her own compositions, long and melancholic and drawn from her second album, with an ease her spoken material has not yet fully reached. Stand-up here operates as a second skin, a way of giving the songs context and accessibility. The result sits closer to solo musical theatre than to a comedy set.

The friction is tonal. Long, melancholic songs and quick punchlines do not co-exist easily, and the hour reads as a collage of album tracks with jokes wedged between them. The topics, too, get touched rather than opened. HPV, migration, estrangement, mental health, being a first-generation queer migrant making art in London: each is introduced, each earns a laugh, none is fully excavated. Bryony Kimmings built Sex Idiot out of an STI diagnosis and followed it to its end. Hannah Gadsby dismantled the joke form itself in Nanette to reach what the joke was hiding. Ning has that material and does not yet go there. Writing comedy in a third language about trauma is genuinely hard, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise, but the reticence is what stops the show lodging in the memory afterwards.

Her Chinese-language asides, Amitabha Buddha (阿弥陀佛) and tactical hydration (战术性喝水), land for those who catch them and pass straight through everyone else, and Ning seems untroubled by the split. That refusal to translate herself downward is one of the interesting aspects about the show.

It matters, too, that she is not working alone. Over the past three years, Chinese queer women and non-binary comedians have become a recognisable force, from Lightning womxn in London (闪电女子脱口秀) onwards, using stand-up to amplify queerness, family estrangement and migration. Ning is a rising star of that current in London, and one of very few working it in English.

What she already has is intimate and rare: raw, slightly cringey, deeply touching and brutally honest, funny about things that are dark and traumatised, from someone less than a year into stand-up who arrived at it from visual art rather than theatre. Her musicianship is fully formed. Her physicality as a performer is not yet, and that is the gap, but the breakthrough show is exciting and not far off at all.


★★★★1/2

For more information, please visit: https://riversidestudios.co.uk/whats-on/E2-this-time-is-different/

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