Portsmouth comedian brings home highly-praised hilarious show

Rising comedy double act Stokes & Summers are bringing their highly-praised revue A Really Really Big Modern Telly to Portsmouth College, where Portsmouth-hailing Kate Stokes previously studied.

The duo’s show earned rave reviews at the Brighton Fringe Festival and International Youth Arts Festival in Kingston. Stokes & Summers also recently performed as part of the Somerset Fringe Festival. Now they’re bringing it back home for a performance at Portsmouth College on Thursday 22nd September, from 7:15pm.

A Really Really Big Modern Telly explores contemporary issues of narcissism, consumerism, and technology in a fast-paced show featuring stories, sketches, and music

Two extended sketches at the heart of the show feature a reimagining of the myth of Narcissus, set in a self-help health spa retreat, and an urban fable about a celeb-obsessed woman stepping inside her television and discovering what happens when the consumer becomes the consumed.

The hour-long show integrates performance and projection and combines old and new forms of entertainment.

Kate Stokes, 22, from Portsmouth, and Claudia Summers, 22, from Reading, who devised and perform in the show, are drama graduates from Bristol University, where their comedy partnership began. A Really Really Big Modern Telly was first performed as part of Bristol Gradfest 2015, and has since been extended for this year’s tour.

Kate Stokes was a student at Portsmouth’s Priory School from 2005 to 2010, where she took the Performing Arts BTEC and regularly participated in extra-curricular drama such as the Shakespeare Schools Festival.

She went on to study drama and theatre at Portsmouth College, before going to the University of Bristol. Since graduating in 2015, Kate returned to Portsmouth and worked in the New Theatre Royal Café and as a Front-of-House Assistant at The Kings Theatre while working on new theatre projects.

Both the New Theatre Royal and The Kings Theatre supported the development of A Really Really Big Modern Telly by providing free rehearsal space.

The first performances on the tour were at Latest Music Bar for the Brighton Fringe Festival, after which the show was performed at the Arthur Cotterell Theatre Studio at Kingston College as part of the International Youth Arts Festival. Most recently, the show was performed at the Princess Theatre in Burnham-on-Sea as part of the Somerset Fringe Festival.

Kate Stokes said: “I’m incredibly excited to perform the show in my hometown. We’re so grateful for the support we had from the local theatres when developing the show in May, and we’re really thankful for Jo Field at Portsmouth College for giving us the opportunity to perform in the college theatre studio.

“It’s especially exciting on a very personal level as it was when I was at studying A-Level drama, creating and performing theatre in that studio, that I realised that I definitely wanted to pursue theatre as a career.”

Book tickets for A Really Really Big Modern Telly at Portsmouth College online »