Jack Whitehall: Work in Progress at Assembly Hall Review
There are few comedians who could walk onto a Fringe stage at 10.20 in the morning and have a packed room roaring with laughter within minutes. Jack Whitehall, it turns out, is absolutely one of them.
Returning to Edinburgh with Work in Progress, Whitehall is testing out brand-new material ahead of his forthcoming tour. The clue is very much in the title – this isn’t supposed to be a polished, perfectly structured finished show. It’s an opportunity to watch one of the UK’s biggest comedians figuring out what works, what doesn’t and occasionally wondering aloud why he ever thought something was a good idea in the first place.
And that is a huge part of its charm.
At 10.20am, you could forgive an audience for being slightly subdued. Instead, Whitehall worked the room up remarkably quickly and before long everyone was completely on board, lapping up every minute of it. His ability to command a crowd is undeniable.
The new material covers everything from becoming a father and the realities of parenting to his relationship with his own famously eccentric dad, Michael. Whitehall has always been at his best when turning his own life and shortcomings into the punchline, and there is plenty of that here.
There is also something refreshing about seeing a comedian more accustomed to arenas back at the Fringe. Without the huge production surrounding him, everything rests on Whitehall, a microphone and whether the material can make the room laugh and It does. Constantly.
His crowd work is effortless, his storytelling remains brilliantly animated and his ability to take a small observation and build it into something ridiculous is as strong as ever. Even when you can tell a section is still being developed, Whitehall has enough experience and natural stage presence to make the journey towards the punchline as entertaining as the punchline itself.
By the end, it is genuinely easy to forget that this is supposedly unfinished material.
Perhaps the biggest compliment you can give a work-in-progress show is that you immediately want to see what it becomes when it’s finished. If this is Jack Whitehall still figuring things out, the eventual tour is in very safe hands.
Getting an Edinburgh audience this animated before most of them have finished their morning coffee is no small achievement.
An absolutely brilliant hour of stand-up and easily one of the comedy highlights of our Fringe so far.
Jack Whitehall: Work in Progess plays at Main Hall at Assembly Hall as part of the Edinburgh Fringe until 15 Aug.
★★★★★
Written by Liam for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
