Last Updated on October 24, 2026
How to save Penguin paperbacks from extinction? Perform them naked whilst wearing flippers
5.0 out of 5.0 starsRun, don’t waddle, to feeding time at the zoo: two months of this literary lunacy has arrived from Edinburgh to Victoria.
An evening commencing with full-frontal nudity, bum-blown smoke farts and cheeky penile wobbling isn’t my husband’s usual Friday night entertainment, but it’s what he got when I took him with me to Garry Starr’s Classic Penguins.
I’m not saying the husband is prudish, but him asking ‘what would your dad say’ had me replying, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be phased by the naked crowd surfing but I’d rather not pass grapes mouth to mouth with strangers. What with Covid and all.’ Yet here we were, with no shortage of volunteers for these audience participation opportunities and more.
Apologies for the evening publication of this review, but as I often say, things need to percolate a bit before I can get words down on the page and it’s taken me a while to process just what I witnessed. Classic Penguins is a combination of watching a one-man game of charades, acting out puns based on famous book titles and witnessing a bizarre self-induced hazing ceremony. My favourite moment might have been the Daft Punk dizziness of Around The World in 80 Days. How the man was still standing, after death-spiral hi-jinx that would surely have floored Torvill and Dean, I have no idea.
To be told Classic Penguins is a one-man comedy show performed ‘near naked with flippers’ doesn’t come near to preparing you for what I’d instead describe as the antithesis of Dita Von-Teese, burlesque comedy with passionate reference to ‘boo-ooks’. Moby Dick makes an immediate appearance and I don’t mean Herman Melville.
By the end of the show, there will be no crevice of Garry’s anatomy that you’ve not seen, and indeed some lucky audience participants get even nearer. Just when you’ve held your face in your hands in disbelief at the lady inspecting Garry’s behind with a magnifying glass (a diminutive character from literature has been lost up there), Garry mounts his trapeze and launches himself, rear end first, in and out of the convulsing audience. If you got upset by Emerald Fennell’s tribute to Wuthering Heights, let’s just say this may not be the show for you.
It’s a brave soul who sits in the front few rows at Classic Penguins, my husband and I were undecided about whether the volunteers were plants. A woman sitting immediately next to us had been on the verge of hysteria from the start; as if on cue, she managed to propel herself into one of his “Come on sausage! Come and play!” invitations. Her stint (in response to George Orwell’s 1984) involved pogo-jumping to the angry expletive-filled ‘Killing in the Name’ by Rage Against The Machine whilst hurling endless punnets of fruit at her penguin-shaped target. I think she was rather too enthusiastic and good at it to be a random pick.
And just when you’re feeling smug you haven’t been enlisted to recreate Frankenstein’s naked monster, or get strapped Gulliver-style, to the stage with gaffer tape, here he comes! Inches away from us, like Top of the Pops’ dry ice in your face, it’s Garry sailing over the fingertips of rows A to J, like a rockstar in the 100 Club. If you’re not familiar with a book title Body Surfing, you will be now.
Why Garry — and I think we can say we’re intimate enough to be on first name terms now — is single-handedly attempting to save works of classic literature from extinction isn’t exactly explained. If we’re going to get deep, we might say Classic Penguins is an apocalyptic cabaret cocktail lampooning the joint horrors of mass AI book-shredding and Antarctic environmental destruction. A simpler analogy would be that just as Instagram cat videos delight everyone with clips of said cat swatting items off kitchen worktops, Penguin Garry, in his flippers, waddles over to his bookshelf, and swipes orange book after orange book onto the increasingly messy stage floor.
There are moments of song, Bohemian Rhapsody is a sure-fire way to guarantee audience participation with or without a layer of pseudo-Shakespeare ham-acting. It’s got to be said too that Garry, or Damien Warren-Smith, to give him his non-clown name, displays incredible fitness and core strength moving breathlessly from mimicking A Handmaid’s Tale’s ‘Of Garry’ pregnancy bump to physically leap-frogging over yet another audience masochist. I feared for the poor woman’s head although she did survive unharmed.
Just when you think Classic Penguins cannot get any crazier, another lady from the front row offers herself up as sacrificial victim, to get completely bare as well. Out of Rudyard Kipling-required necessity, of course. By the time the stage is filled with yet more naked penguin volunteers popping out of the wings, I’m not sure if I’m in the closing act of Stamptown or a bizarre Fleetwood Mac fetishist’s cheese dream. There are pointy beaks, ball sacks and breasts bobbing around everywhere, and to make it even weird, there’s a reassuring voice over from David Attenborough.
‘No I wouldn’t take my dad’, I replied to my husband. But everyone else, GO!
Classic Penguins
23 Oct to 3 January 2027
Age recommendation 18+.
The Other Palace
12 Palace Street
London
SW1E 5JA
Tel: 020 7592 0302
Classic Penguins is part of Francesca Moody Production’s season of work at The Other Palace which also consists of Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree until 15 November, then Feeling Afraid As If Something Is About To Happen from 19 November to 10 January.
Looking for something different? Check out our off West End theatre previews.
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