Symphony is about finding your own story among the advertised illusion of lifestyles, opportunities and pre-written shoulds and woulds. Fluidly slipping in and out of characters or behind the keys, various guitars and the drum kit, the performers are a talented bunch, and especially at the kick-off with Tom Wells’ Jonesy, often manipulating the instruments to comedic effect.

Iddon Jones plays a 15-year old Welsh underdog who gets the PE GCSE blues. It’s all skimpy shorts, adolescent dreams and grinding expectations of lad culture but it also manages to take a witty look at how we measure our own success against expectations we draw from existing narratives. In Jonesy’s case Cool Runnings was his forming narrative, and why not? In Tom Wells: Plays 1 published in 2021 Jonesy will be right next to Jumpers For Goalposts, part of the playwright’s “Young Men and Sports”-Cycle and it will feel like foreplay, an amusing side note to the infinitely superior Jumpers.

A Love Song for the People of London by Ella Hickson makes Symphony slide unashamedly from dick jokes with asthma inhalers to pie-baking Zooey Deschanel admirers on this years’ universal kookiness scale. Bemoaning kindles for ruining chances to flirt and damning fateful brollies for communication mishaps, the players in this menagerie are serenaded by London (in shape of a Brit Pop front man) itself. It’s a great twist, delivering one of the best (musical) moments of the piece – a throbbing soundtrack about chancing your luck. Liam Gerrard plays Alex who bakes pies when he’s anxious and who sniffs his dream girl’s hair on the bus. Alex pathetically rages against the unkind urban spirit who is selective about whose love life he’ll support. Suck it, pie creep! London doesn’t owe you anything.

Striking me as the most genuine in this triad of self-narrating characters are Jack Brown’s mucky pup philanderer, and Katie Elin-Salt, as a woman who knows what she wants. The rise and fall of an urban love story in Nick Payne’s My Thoughts On Leaving You is a funny account of heart break, full of delightful stranger than fiction contrasts – real people meeting in a puddle of wee and trying to create something meaningful out of it.

The show ends on a beautiful chanson note about the City and for a moment the three plays come together under a wicked sound blanket, thickly woven like an urban structure with ideas of fate, predetermination and luck sticking out like passionately moving limbs. Although the unruly punchiness of the piece was highlighted by a crackling soundtrack, surely curtsey of a repeatedly dropped amplifier, the venue hindered the chance to be entirely engrossed in the music festival style art form mix. The raked seating in Assembly’s Bosco Tent is far removed from eyes-closed, swaying in the crowd with an East End microbrewery beer can in hand. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the venue, maybe on that day Symphony was just a love song from the wrong city.

Originally written for Exeunt as part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2014 coverage.

For some people Christmas time is the best time of the year. It’s all so very special: candles and glittery lights everywhere, the smell of mulled wine at the markets and lovingly picking presents for the special people in your life. Drag performance legend David Hoyle has, of course, seen through the sanctimonious facade of our consumer culture and, with a song on his lips and red baubles dangling from his hips, he sets out to show his audience the dark side of Christmas.

But he is no ordinary Scrooge, as together with musician Richard Thomas he merrily flips off various shades of heteronormative hypocrisy to make people aware that society usually demands of them to be a cruel and insensitive “mix between a moron and robot” to succeed.

The show starts with a weird, inclusive song proclaiming that “We’re All In This Together”, and I wondered if I’ve accidentally stepped into a special Soho High School Musical adaptation but I need not have worried too long. Gays in the military, male sexual domination, religion – everything gets a quick once over, if you catch my drift.

The focus of the show is clearly on Hoyle, with no set on the stage and only a macabre Christmas tree to set the mood for the evening. Richard Thomas, who is the stooge behind the piano, comes across a bit laboured at times when he gives the cues to prompt the next song-clad rant. But he seems to be enjoying himself watching Hoyle being cynical while belting out lyrics that make the audience gasp. The songs are funny but more than just a little caustic. To say that this show is not really suited for the light-hearted would be like saying that heroin is not quite suited to cure sleeplessness. But better leave the absurd similes to Hoyle, who, for example, thinks you’d be “Better Off Dead” if you’ve never heard of German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg.

And here is the surprising thing about the evening: although the set-up could very easily just have been a guy in women’s clothes ranting about Christmas and trying to earn some cheap laughs, Hoyle and Thomas dig deeper and only make it look like a cheap laugh. It’s a simple dramatic strategy, using contrasts not to shock, but to point out what is actually shocking in society. Ergo, the song about suicide clearly needed to be spiced up with a tap dance routine.

Sadly, most of the songs are a slightly forgettable, and I must admit that I expected a bit more finesse from Thomas, who in the past wrote the music to Jerry Springer – The Opera. But all in all it’s fun to see a show in which, for once, one does not care the slightest bit about political correctness and has cocky audience interaction.

This cabaret show does a good job with taking its audience on a slow descent into hell. And did I mention that it’s not for the easily offended? Although, that being said, mentions of bestiality and necrophilia should not stop you if you like your entertainment clever, queer and thought-provoking.