Leila Navabi: Composition, Soho Theatre, review: the survivor of a tabloid backlash comes out fighting

“I didn’t want to do this,” frets Leila Navabi. All she wanted was to sing whimsical songs about vegetables. Stand-up was never the plan – least of all political stand-up. That she is now doing it in the West End, after a buzzed-about Edinburgh Fringe debut this August, is an accident for which we can blame Rishi Sunak, the tabloid press and – the main target of her ire – the wicked, cackling svengalis at BBC Radio Wales who used her as a “mouthpiece”.

With a face covered in glitter and a singlet emblazoned with her initials, the impish young Welsh comic looks a little like she’s in superhero drag – and Composition offers a comic origin-story worthy of Marvel. That story – which she tells through jazzy, Tim Minchin-ish piano songs, and confessional scars-and-sequins stand-up in the Kiri Pritchard-McLean mould – begins with potatoes. 

In 2020, aged 19, Navabi posted a silly rap about potatoes online. It went viral, and the Beeb offered her a stand-up slot on air. She had no degree, no qualifications, no idea what to do with her life, and suddenly “this shining orb called stand-up comedy” was dangled in front of her. She’d never tried it, but how hard could it be? The catch was that they demanded a political routine about then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak. (Rishi who? Navabi – who plays up her political cluelessness very amusingly – had to Google him.) The producers suggested she could get away with making jokes about him that others couldn’t. Why might that be, she wondered. They wouldn’t say. 

One joke she wrote for them compared Sunak’s appearance to “Prince Charles in brownface”. Any sane person would expect a backlash to that. In Composition, Navabi transforms a milquetoast Welsh radio producer into a ruthless Hollywood exec (complete with American accent) called “Stefano”. In this telling, Stefano didn’t merely expect a backlash but actively courted one, laughingly sacrificing her to the angry mob.

A bit far fetched? Maybe, but the mob certainly were angry. The tabloids, by declaring there was a “race row”, created one; one online article prompted more than 700 vitriolic below-the-line comments. Most comedians have a bad first gig, but they don’t generally lead to international headlines and death threats.

This gripping yarn takes a while to arrive. The first third of the show, in which Navabi sets out her stall (jokes about her Muslim father, Catholic mother, and “white-passing” sisters; a riff about a school bully; wry observations about race and the state of the comedy industry) suffers from uncertain pacing and delivery. Perhaps overcompensating for nerves, Navabi makes her set-ups too slow and emphatic, dampening the punchlines when they land.

But she has a great, agile face for comedy – and a Bill Bailey-ish knack for getting a second laugh out of a line by undercutting it with a quizzical look, a frown, a sheepish grin or flicked-out tongue.

Navabi touches on the perils of early over-exposure and the pressure put on ethnic-minority performers to do political material about their identity; but what she calls the “lecture-y” parts feel loosely written, wrestling with questions to which she hasn’t yet found answers. I suspect she’s in earnest when she says she doesn’t want to be earnest; the funniest parts of this promising debut are the weird, whimsical asides. Come for the political scandal, stay for the goofy song about horses. 

Until Sat: sohotheatre.com