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Stuart Murphy: Little Earthquakes 4**** - One4Review
one4review | On 08, Aug 2025
Stuart Murphy takes the stage.. several times — it’s clear this is completely improvised.
He talks us through his recent catastrophic audiences, and it sets the tone for the evening.
At 23:30, in a room of maybe 15 or 16 people, he kills. He’s incredibly funny, witty, his one-liners are excellent, and his strange turns and weird worlds keep the audience fully engaged while building consensus.
The stand-up is good — solid, funny, entertaining — but it’s in his improvisation where Stuart flies.
Verbally, there’s no one like him. He’s witty in the moment in a way that fewer than 1% of stand-ups are.
In the WhatsApp chat we have for One4Review:
“Is anyone reviewing Stu Murphy? I was just at an improv show with him in it and I was crying with laughter! “
That’s high praise from people watching non-stop comedy shows.
The material is fun, light, silly, and ropes us in – takes on material we’ve never seen tackled before — he surprises us. The climax is a tidy little theatrical piece about capitalism.
I was frustrated by the shortness of the final piece. Sometimes there’s a lack of a central theme and stagecraft — no music before or after, no props – there is no emotional take away here.
He doesn’t need the mic, but he uses it to heighten a joke with physicality once. These decisions are fine, but they can feel more like a lack of thought than intentional choices. It’s a man focused on being funny rather than curating a show.
That criticism might be unfair. He is pretty much guaranteed to make you laugh, isn’t that what comedy is all about?
What you get here is likely the funniest, most verbally engaging improviser in Scotland. Doing the bits that he finds funniest.
With stagecraft, structure, more honest sharing about his life, and a little more audience interaction included within the theatrical piece — this show could really fly.
I’ve never seen a man in more need of an artistic director.
But he’s constantly iterating and making things better. He stops when he makes a new joke that lands and notes it – improvising a meta joke from that moment.
You can see him adjusting to exactly what the room needs as the night goes on.
I don’t know many comedians this unknown who could carry a room with that few people and make it full of laughter.
He didn’t lose the audience once — and whenever he might have, he pulled them back with inspired, improvisational witty lines, verbally jousting with the politest heckler ever: an audience member constantly offering encouragement like an overly friendly mum. That was the motif of the show.
A brilliant improviser at the top of his game, and a stand-up commanding laughter to erupt for a full hour, even in the quietest room.
★★★★☆
Reviewed by Sharpie
Monkey Barrel – Tron
23.30 (55 mins)
Until 24 Aug (not 11)
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