Stand-up comedy is a tough old game.
There can be no lonelier or scarier scenario. Standing alone under the spotlight, having to make people laugh constantly for an hour or more. Just you. Nothing but your wit and imagination to entertain an expectant audience.
To be able to sell out Leicester Square theatre for two nights as part of a national tour, running from January to June 2026, with over 25 successful years under the belt, is quite a feat.
Hats off, then, to Simon Evans. A grizzled veteran of the comedy circuit. Not only is he an acclaimed stand-up comedian, but has innumerable radio, TV and writing credits. A true and enduring heavyweight in the often fickle, ever-changing world of comedy.
Humour is, of course, an intensely subjective matter, and successful comics are often very careful to reflect the attitudes, belief systems and experiences of their audience. A Simon Evans crowd is quite different from the bear pit of a more youthful comedy club audience.
Evans gleefully tells us shortly into his set that he has recently entered his seventh decade, and the demographic of his audience broadly reflects his age and subject matter. A long sequence about the deaths of iconic comics from his childhood, Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howard, and Benny Hill elicits gentle laughs of recognition, whilst an extended diversion into the growing burdens of male health issues in later middle age, whether that be details of MRI scans or Prostate biopsies are funny, whilst a wee bit graphic. This is not a set based upon TikTok, Instagram, social media influencing, or the latest instalment of “Love Island.” Evans knows his audience, and subtly (and sometimes not so subtly), effectively taps into their neuroses, anxieties, and frustrations.
Simon Evans is also clearly a well-read, intellectual man. During the show, he ranges widely upon various esoteric topics, whether that be Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 epic poem “Kubla Khan”, a smidgeon of Plato, and a Shakespearean coda at the end. Yet, whilst casting himself as a public intellectual, he adroitly continues to undercut some of his more abstruse philosophical and literary reflections with amusing anecdotes of his search for domestic harmony as he grapples with the demands of aging parents, coping with the very different world views of his grown up children and his own need to find an anchor point in a world which is increasingly speeding up and becoming smarter, more demanding and more exhausting. Again, a trope that his audience largely responds to.
Throughout, the tone is unmistakeably Evans. He is by turns provocative, dryly acidic, and even sometimes sneeringly caustic. However, this veneer of world-weary, fin de siècle disparagement is shot through with a boyish enthusiasm, whether that be for the progressive rock and pop of his youth or great literature. He lays genuine stress on the importance of continually reinventing oneself and testing one’s opinions; of occasionally deliberately getting out of one’s depth to keep intellectual torpor at bay and maintain mental stimulation. In short, to seek out new experiences and new cerebral challenges.
And herein lies a problem. Those who have seen a Simon Evans show before will recognise a number of the anecdotes and musings that make up some of this performance, especially in the second half where well worn (though still amusing), topics are given a further run out; whether that be about the results of his DNA tests, his resemblance to Leonard Rossiter or a discussion about the hidden physical nature of his eyes. These are narrative strands that have been heard before in Evans’s routines, and the presence of so many of them diluted the overall thrust and power of his set on this occasion.
When discussing the structure of stand-up comedy during the show, Evans presciently referenced the fact that, at a certain level and playing certain venues, you have to factor in two slots, a broadly ninety-minute plus show to put in an interval, thereby offering more than a one-hour fringe or festival slot. The rather stretched nature of last night’s show emphasised the challenges that stand-ups face in honing and crafting a cohesive, tightly structured piece over a full evening.
Whilst no one can deny Simon Evans’s skill and deftness as a hugely successful stand-up comedian, this current show, especially for long-term Evans fans, would benefit from a tightening of its structural narrative and a sharper concentration on crisper, fresher new material.
Review by Johnny Oxford
With the AI singularity looming and “reality” feeling increasingly unstable, Evans looks ahead to the coming shockwaves of technology, and back to the analogue pleasures of hitch-hiking, pub bets, and getting properly lost. Turning his famously dry, surgically precise style on the big modern questions: Are we living in a computer simulation? What happens when your body starts issuing software updates you didn’t request? And is staring straight at a solar eclipse, against expert advice, actually an act of courageous self-sacrifice on the road to true enlightenment?
Part philosophical exploration, part nostalgic joyride, Staring at the Sun is a hilarious analysis of reality and trust from a man desperately trying to keep his balance while the floor keeps moving. The tone is unmistakably Evans: provocative, literate, and playfully combative, but also soaked in self-awareness. Evans draws on theories propounded by philosophers and mystics since the days of Plato and Ecclesiastes, casting himself as a public intellectual but constantly undercutting his points with brutally funny domestic truths.
SIMON EVANS: STARING AT THE SUN
Leicester Square Theatre, 27 and 28 February 2026
Tour continues to 18 June 2026
