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Luke Wright: Pub Grub

 
Mark Harding Review by Mark Harding 4 Published: 10 Aug 2025 Pleasance Dome Show Dates: 30 Jul 2025-12 Aug 2025

Luke Wright knows how to put a show together – an especially useful skill, because as a performer he walks a tightrope between the different aspects of his personality and material that lesser mortals would fall off.

Ingenious, witty, sophisticated, touching, and vulgar

In Pub Grub he casts his keen-eyed focus on the domestic and the everyday: the necessary treat of pub grub but the worry about calories; Chelmsford, and gammons. The details of family life: Netflix and Harlan Coben; babies; Kevin and Perry; detective stories; TV dinners; childhood; friction with his dad; and his own fatherhood.

Somehow, the show navigates the paradox that is Luke Wright: obscenities delivered in elegant verse and delicately placed emotion in sarcastic tirades; a naturally sardonic air paired with warmth and openness; a grip-by-the-collar performance poet who delights in formal poetic structures. He is a committed woke lefty who is developing a degree of tolerance for those with opposing views.

The show delivers his trademark observational comedy and awareness of the absurdities of the culture we live in, mixed with poems of family relationships that manage to be unsentimental yet touching. We also get plenty of rude and extremely funny jokes.

A consummate performance poet, Wright’s show is ingenious, witty, sophisticated, touching and vulgar. Throughout, he is always in formal control of the material, delivering a performance that fits together like a well-crafted box, closing with a satisfying snap.

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The Blurb:

Fun and filthy poems from someone who knows what they're doing. If there were any justice, he'd be Poet Laureate, or King. A sticky-floored celebration of the ordinary. Wright conjures up a world of Tuesday lunchtimes and small-town boozers in poems that burst with inventive language, sonic trickery, and big-hearted storytelling. 'A streetwise panache and a sardonic comic verve to rival Stewart Lee' ***** (Telegraph). 'Honesty, humour, ire and wonder. He is at the peak of his powers' ***** (Stage). 'His poems shoot arrows through the heart' **** (List).