The Four Johns

The Four Johns are playing Old Parcels Office Artspace on Saturday 14 November, with music by Carmel O'Toole. They describe themselves as spoken word comedy theatre: a group of spoken-word artists who write and perform their own material. The result is funny, satirical, challenging, innovative and anarchic, mixing sketches, comedy and poetry.

It's a broad description, and the act lives up to it by pulling from a few different traditions at once. The Midlands Fringe reviewed it as 'a mini circus, filled with wonderful choreographed comedy played off in different scenarios', and summed it up as something like 'Billy Bragg meets Monty Python for a pint'. That gives you a decent sense of the territory they cover: political and social commentary delivered with a sketch-comedy sensibility, and a good deal of it played out in character.

Because they write and perform their own material, the whole thing is their own creation rather than a curated night of separate acts. The sketches, the comedy and the poetry are woven together into one show, and Carmel O'Toole provides the music throughout. It's a full evening's worth of work, too — the show runs for about two hours.

Doors open at 7.00pm and it starts at 7.30pm, so you've got plenty of time to get in and settled before things kick off. Tickets are £10.