A one-person session of clowning tends to work best when the performance leans into its own intrinsic silliness. For Luke Pitman’s new show, The House of Pitman, the premise isn’t just silly: it’s ridiculously, utterly, enjoyably stupid.
The premise is that Luke’s character is the youngest member of a family of strippers, but is not (yet) a performer himself. Called upon to fill in when the star of the family’s strip club is suddenly unavailable, his performance quickly degenerates into anarchic mayhem.
The actual striptease elements are only hinted at – Pitman dresses in a very cheap pilot’s uniform, complete with PVC cap, that looks as if it won’t so much rip open as fall apart. There is some muscle flexing going on, but it’s more a pastiche of the salacious male stripper genre than anything else. This is less Magic Mike, more Tommy Cooper.
Pitman’s physical comedy allows for various diversionary routes, from playing multiple members of the Pitman family (and strip club employees), waiters and DJs to a potted history of the Pitmans back to the dawn of man (a 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof complete with Also Sprach Zarathustra soundtrack). There are some fun audience interactions, too, although slightly coloured by most of the audience of this London performance comprising various of Pitman’s friends and (real, non-stripper) family.
The highlight, though, comes when the disembodied voice, which is coaching this newest stripper into his role, instructs him that it’s time for his main event. Tying in with the airline theme, Pitman must get into a (sizeable, though not exactly large) suitcase. As audience members help zip him up, it’s remarkable that he can contort himself into such a space. But it’s the struggle in which he does so that illustrates Pitman’s comedic as well as acrobatic skill.
After that, his ability to extricate himself is as amusing an act of escapology as his initial incarceration was to watch. There is something relentlessly absurd about watching a man stagger about the stage, still mostly encased in luggage with only his legs freed, that indicates Pitman’s ability to craft visually arresting stupidity.
One issue with placing such a feat at the midpoint of The House of Pitman’s running time is that everything after can seem like an anticlimax. And so it does here, with Pitman’s comedic stripper persona still entertaining but not living up to the main event. That is, at least, until the suitcase returns for the show’s denouement, where Pitman manages to one-up his own previous stunt.
It’s a fitting climax to such a silly performance, performed with a comedic nonchalance that it is easy to overlook Pitman’s technical prowess in favour of his hilarious nonchalance. Just as Cooper relied upon a genuine magician’s skill to make his ineptitude as hilarious as possible, so too Pitman uses his finely-honed craft to make himself appear utterly stupid. At that, he undoubtedly succeeds.
Reviewed on 21 July 2026 and then at Edinburgh Fringe
