Review: Elliot Steel: Soft Boi Core

It has not been a good year for Elliot Steel. Serious family illness, big relationship breakup, getting hit repeatedly in the head by a huge MMA fighter; always difficult. Even the Tory defeat he’d waited 14 years for was slightly tainted, that snap election eliciting a big Fringe show rewrite, apparently. 

If so, it barely shows: this is a superb hour of stand-up, and brutally honest. Although it’s hardly a show sometimes, as Steel paces the stage, hand covering mouth as he mumbles painful truths.

The major trauma here is the cancer diagnosis of his father, the comedian Mark Steel, now thankfully in recovery. Elliot may be a nepo baby (“it’s not helped that much,” he says, surveying empty seats) but there’s nominative determinism too, given that Steel also became a cage fighter, which definitely didn’t come from Mark. 

Soft Boi Core builds towards the aforementioned fight, and the first half is a topical masterclass; refreshingly personal takes on Gaza bewilderment and Olympic-ceremony fallout. A curiously crass bit of sexism then briefly derails things, but sets up a major theme, as Steel – epic mullet and straight-outta-Croydon diction still very much intact – wrestles with his old-school masculinity, while trying to open up to his ailing dad. Brutal but beautiful.