August 12, 2026 at Main Hall at Assembly Hall, 22.40
It’s not often you see an Edinburgh show and wonder exactly how it works.
With The Bench Mike Wozniak has conjured a situation, and a world, that’s so fully realised it feels like it must be a carefully honed, scripted piece. But the scale of it, and its variably interactive nature, suggests that there must be at least some (lots?) of improvisation. Or at least there must have been in his earliest performances, and perhaps now those improvised bits have become settled material. I don’t know!
I have to admit that although I’m a massive comedy nerd, to the horror of some of my friends, I’m not overly familiar with Mike Wozniak or his work. I’ve listened to a couple of Three Bean Salad podcasts and watched an episode of Junior Taskmaster – and I thought he was great as one of The Magnificent Alice Lowe’s victims in Prevenge. I’ve not been avoiding him, our paths just haven’t crossed much!
Anyway, that has all changed. I’ve now seen The Bench and I’m officially a fan.
Wozniak takes to the stage like a couroroy-clad maths teacher, his jaunty heel pointing and ‘erm’- and ‘crumbs’-punctuated delivery only adding to that impression.
The premise of this show is simple, a commemorative bench in Wozniak’s sleepy Exeter town was burned and defiled, and he’s here to fill us in on the details. We probably won’t get to the bottom of it tonight, he explains, as this is an ongoing situation!
And so begins the elaborate weaving of a tale containing dozens of fabulously-named characters, each with an equally glorious backstory. Soon, he’s constructed an entertaining and complex web of relationships and possible motives. He then invites the audience to help him ‘sleuth’.
He offers us a long list of things and people he could potentially talk about, delivered quickly and flippantly, but even as eager as this audience were they rarely deviated from that list. One woman did, I think, try to trip up The Woz by deliberately requesting something he said we didn’t have time to cover – Welsh Nationalist Extremists. Not that this phased him, after a quick ‘erm, crumbs!’ he spoke at length at about Welsh Nationalism, including some seemingly well-pronounced Welsh language political terms, with a fluency that made me think he’d definitely said this before.
A lot of the laughs come from his continual insistence that we’re running out of time. ‘We don’t have time to get into this but… Okay well, just quickly!’ he’ll say, before rolling into a delightful and lengthy, completely irrelevant anecdote.
My best guess is that at this stage of his run, Wozniak is folding whatever improv results from audience suggestions into what he’s already constructed over previous performances. The final mixture, two hours of solid village -related material, will then be perfect for touring with an interval. I just wish I knew how much he started with, how the process has worked, if it’s all gone as he intended… (Come on Stu Goldsmith – you’re our only hope!)
But no matter how he’s running the show it’s great.
Even the marching and the booming of cannons from the nearby Military Tattoo don’t derail proceedings, as he barrels through a fabulous storytelling experience that, at least on the night I saw it, wrapped up expertly and hilariously in the very last moment.
Sarah Stringer