Funny, thoughtful, and unexpectedly moving, Full English is a love letter to the quirks and power of English language.
At Barons Court Theatre, Full English promised not bacon and eggs, but a feast of words served up with the poet performer Melanie Branton’s sharp humour and poetic flair. During a wonderfully eccentric, sharply intelligent, and surprisingly moving evening, I was reminded why words are not just tools, but the little bricks that build and sometimes break the walls between us.
Melanie Branton is an erudite entertainer in the truest sense. She has the rare ability to turn scholarship into theatre without ever slipping into lecture mode. One moment she’s a performance poet, her voice rich with rhythm and wit; the next, she’s a playful historian, pulling on a funny hat or waving around a prop to embody the strange cast of characters who’ve shaped our language: smelly Vikings, the “not-so-fancy” Normans, earnest 18th-century grammarians, and even Covid-era or the double negatives police. Her patchwork trousers, deliberately mismatched, felt like a fitting visual metaphor for English itself, stitched together from countless influences, yet somehow holding together.
What struck me most was the balance between comedy and depth. There were lots of laughs with audience members joining in happily. But there were also moments when the weight of language’s history landed hard. Branton didn’t shy away from the darker chapters: colonialism, slavery, the power of words to silence as well as to liberate. It reminded me of Noam Chomsky’s idea that language is not just a system of rules, but a living, breathing force, ever evolving, reflecting our humanity, and sometimes distorting it.
One of my favourite sections came when she explored the 18th-century obsession with order, precision, and correctness in grammar. I’ve always had an interest in neoclassicism in architecture and design, but I had never really thought about how those same attitudes shaped the way language was policed. Watching Branton link linguistic tidiness with broader cultural ideals of symmetry and balance was an unexpected revelation.
Branton’s energy never faltered. She has a natural warmth that drew the whole room in, making us participants rather than passive observers. Whether she was conjuring smelly Vikings or inviting us to laugh at the pretensions of grammar snobs, she carried the audience along effortlessly, with the kind of charm that makes you want to lean in closer.
What Full English achieves, above all, is to remind us that language is both deeply serious and wonderfully silly. It is history, it is politics, it is laughter, it is pain and it belongs to all of us. This is not a show just for linguists or poets; it’s for anyone who has ever delighted in a pun, puzzled over a spelling rule, or wondered why we say the things we do. In other words, it’s for everyone.
[…] It’s got a fabulous FIVE STAR review from A Youngish Perspective, who said it was “a wonderfully eccentric, sharply intelligent, and surprisingly moving evening” https://ayoungishperspective.co.uk/2025/09/18/review-full-english/?amp= […]