Your Power, Your Control

Nish Kumar uses a disastrous, bread-roll-throwing charity gig to frame a highly personal hour about political despair, racist abuse, and his own mental health. At the center of the show is his infamous 2019 appearance at a Lord’s Taverners charity lunch, where a room of hostile guests booed him off the stage. Rather than just retelling the story for easy sympathy, Kumar uses the fallout, including the subsequent tabloid coverage and a barrage of online threats, to examine how Britain’s cultural landscape turned hostile to public figures of color. Filmed at London’s Soho Theatre, the set originally toured in 2022 before debuting on Sky Comedy and getting a wider global digital release in 2024. Kumar begins the evening with a high-energy, fifteen-minute barrage aimed squarely at the Conservative government, particularly targeting the myth of Rishi Sunak’s competence. From there, the material shifts into more vulnerable territory, mocking his own messianic fantasies of political martyrdom while confronting the realities of post-traumatic stress disorder. The show leans heavily on his signature style of shouting through the pain, contrasting his loud, theatrical onstage persona with the quieter, more complicated reality of coping with public hostility.