Toussaint Douglass @ Pleasance Courtyard

Toussaint Douglass weaves stories of family, class – and pigeons – in his Best Newcomer-nominated show

Review by Emma Sullivan | 22 Aug 2025
  • Toussaint Douglass

Toussaint Douglass' debut Fringe hour promises accessible pigeon material and it is duly forthcoming, with choice titbits including the story of Winkie, the pigeon who won a medal in the Second World War. But beyond the pigeons, there's also a whole lot more, in a show which examines what it is to feel awkward in the world.

In Douglass' descriptions of his relationships, for example, he plays with euphemisms – his flatmate (his gran), his chief exec (his partner) – deftly transforming an obscure sense of embarrassment into comedy. That ambivalence feels quite fundamental for Douglass, and the show tracks a growing acceptance of what he feels to be his difference, whether that's classified as neurodiversity or simply being a bit odd. The journey to acceptance isn't yet complete (and why would it be?) and the narrative of that journey is still something of a work in progress.

Douglass' indirection also signals a certain caution about the confessional mode, but gradually more details about his eccentric family emerge. His father, forever occupied with DIY; his mother, and her obsession with the squirrels in the back garden. Douglass himself, at school in Lewisham, was bullied mercilessly for his predilection for velvet waistcoats and bow ties. And most significantly, the grandmother who raised him was warm and loving but, as a religious woman, also slightly terrifying in her frequent invocations of fire and brimstone.

Douglass' celebration of an overlooked woman, one of many such disregarded members of the Windrush generation, is at the heart of the show and he wonders at the strength it took for her to leave Dominica as a teenager – and to choose London pigeons over the hummingbirds of paradise. If one delicately traced throughline is the parallel between the unsung pigeon and Douglass' unsung grandmother, another related thread is about class, and there's a bit of poking at the audience about middle-class privilege, which may be justified but doesn't feel fully worked through. He's right, though, that the dove is the one that gets all the love, not the pigeon – and what is that if not white privilege?


Toussaint Douglass: Accessible Pigeon Material, Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker One), 7.25pm, sold out, returns only