Fatiha El-Ghorri: Cockney Stacking Doll review – Taskmaster star thriller, East End world tour | Section

‘Wthe hat comes from here,” says Fatiha El-Ghorri, showing her mouth, “and this” – how she gives to the world – “don’t agree.” From this difference – a beautiful woman in a hijab walking around the East End – a graduate of Taskmaster and a stand-up artist pulls her a lot. She is British A Moroccan Muslim from Hackney, where he grew up being mugged three times a day and learned how to do it. The touring show Cockney Stacking Doll gives us a tour of her world: her divorces and online dating; his family; encounters on buses and in the streets of London, all told through his ruthlessness and self-doubt.

Perhaps the show relies too much on the brutal punchline: most violent characters end with “you think I’m kidding you, bruv?” or even a little leniency “slapped him in the ugly face”. El-Ghorri can retort (and he does, in what he calls a Ted Talk segment at the end of the show) that he had to be tough to get to where he is, where few people like him are invited. Good. And there’s a lot of wisdom here – check out his description of Broadway Market where he grew up as “kefir, lidos and polyamory”.

There is no better version of the Cockney Stacking Doll, which is an hour of comedy that is more diverse and more about her life than the co-op show. El-Ghorri forgets his lines at times, and spends the last third counting down the remaining minutes, filling them with gangs of his nephews and the cheap McDonald’s of Bethnal Green. She has a compelling excuse for memory loss, mind you, she recently experienced forced menopause after cancer surgery. The visits to his gynecologist that formed part of the process are also made in the form of a face, in a show that celebrates El-Ghorri’s journey to get here, and affirms him as an undertone and a pleasure of (apparently) not well seen in the East End.