‘What comes out of here,” says Fatiha El-Ghorri, indicating her mouth, “and this” – how she presents to the world – “don’t match.” From that contrast – a kindly-seeming woman in a hijab peddling gobby East End standup – this Taskmaster graduate and rising standup star draws much of her comic power. She’s a British Moroccan Muslim from Hackney, where she grew up getting mugged three times a day and learned how to handle herself. Touring show Cockney Stacking Doll offers us a tour of her world: her divorces and online dating; her family; encounters on the buses and streets of London, all addressed with a blunt lack of sentimentality and a robust sense of her own ridiculousness.
Perhaps the show is over-reliant on the brutal punchline: too many gags conclude with “you fink I’m playin’ wiv you, bruv?” or an even less compromising “they punched him in the fucking face”. El-Ghorri might retort (and does, in what she calls her Ted Talk section at the end of the show) that she’s had to be tough to get where she is, where so few people like her are invited to be. Fair enough. And there’s plenty of wit here – see her choice description of the Broadway Market neighbourhood in which she was raised as now all “kefir, lidos and polyamory”.
There’s no discernible structure to Cockney Stacking Doll, which is more of an hour of assorted and relatable jokes about her life than it is a coherent show. El-Ghorri forgets her lines at one point, and spends the final third counting down her remaining minutes, filling them with gags about her nieces and Bethnal Green’s low-rent McDonald’s. She’s got a persuasive excuse for the memory lapses, mind you, having recently undergone a forced menopause after cancer surgery. The trips to her gynaecologist that formed part of that process are recreated in characteristically in-yer-face fashion, in a show that celebrates El-Ghorri’s journey to get here, and confirms her as an earthy and endearing voice of the (clearly) not yet wholly gentrified East End.