Reviewed by: The List
Review by Jo Laidlaw | 08 March 2025

What do you want to be when you grow up? This simple prompt is the scaffolding for a new show from Jeromaia Detto that blends his signature style of playful clowning with a completely improvised show based on the audience’s ideas. That makes it sound more complicated than it really is: we write things down, Detto plays with our ideas, then together we decide where they sit on the funny/not funny spectrum.

While utterly simple, to make this work requires balls of steel, next-level crowd-work skills and lightning-quick reflexes. Thankfully, Detto is more than capable of steering even the most archaic ship. He deals with crowd smart-assery, rolls with the punches, grabs props and throws bits of fabric around; and, in one particularly inspired piece of nonsense, even goes outside to bring in some new audience members who were innocently waiting for the next show to start. So many words to describe an hour that Detto insists is ‘just playing’ and although a final moment of emotion does make you wonder what other depths could be explored, how life-enhancing it is to play along with him.