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Ayoade Bamgboye: Swings and Roundabouts

 
Esther Review by Esther 4 Published: 21 Aug 2025 Pleasance Courtyard Show Dates: 30 Jul 2025-24 Aug 2025

Whether it is in the grand way she glides around the stage in Pleasance’s Bunker One or the subtler action of wearing the microphone wire over her shoulder like a delicate shawl, movement forms an integral part of Ayoade Bamgboye’s debut hour, Swings and Roundabouts. She informs us that she has taken a clowning workshop so is “more playful now.”

An enthralling storyteller, as charismatic as they come

Bamgboye slips as seamlessly around the stage as she does accents, dancing between received pronunciation, north London and Nigerian depending on what will best punctuate a punchline. Naija often wins out, with the volume to match. She is also as likely to burst into song as she is to ask people if they were born vaginally or via C-section, since she has a theory about how people enter the world and what it means for their destiny. Accompanied by a grin that is part mischievous, part manic, we never quite know where she might go next, either in the set or in the room. She keeps us on the edge of our seats and her every word, yet never once do we feel in unsafe hands – likely thanks to that clowning workshop.

This all contributes to excellently built tension, as Bamgboye consistently refers to an “old me versus new me.” While we are aware that something significant has happened, she does not reveal it until the final 15 minutes of the show. That reveal is all the more commendable given the hour starts and ends with a story about eavesdropping on a terse conversation between a customer and a shop assistant in The Co-op, “the purgatory of supermarkets.”

Not the most captivating of openings or satisfying of finishes, but Bamgboye carries it through by being completely captivating herself and by using carefully considered turns of phrase. Her love of language and British idioms in particular is best exemplified by a game of sorts that she calls the “World Cup of Peril,” where we debate what is worse between pickles, jams, ordeals and binds.

Eventually, Bamgboye reveals that the ordeal she is grappling with is the death of her father and the subsequent grief. She shares a beautiful supermarket analogy about the loss of a parent that moves someone in the audience to tears. Bamgboye gently goes over to hold their hand, as she complains about the lack of innovation in the condolences space: “It’s all ‘sorry for your loss’ – next!”

Bamgboye is an enthralling storyteller and as charismatic as they come. While Swings and Roundabouts does cover much of the identity-focused material that has become customary in debut shows, few are exploring it as affectingly as she is.

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The Blurb:

The much-anticipated debut show about suffering (and smiling) from Nigerian stand-up Ayoade Bamgboye. Burdened by the gift of sight, a primeval awareness that something is not quite right, and almost three accents, she'll ask life's big questions and provide absolutely no answers. Born in London, raised in Lagos, sacked in Budapest, the poor woman has been there and done that – and to what end? Swings and Roundabouts is about going nowhere fast, being too British to stop apologising, and too Nigerian to stop shouting. As seen in her own Channel 4 Playground.