Catherine Bohart: Borrowing Trouble – Soho Theatre
UTS Rating: 
I’ll start with a confession of my own: before walking into Soho Theatre last night, I had never heard of Catherine Bohart.
This, it turns out, says rather more about the gaps in my stand-up knowledge than it does about Bohart. The Dublin-born comedian, writer and actor has been steadily building an impressive career for the best part of a decade, with appearances on Live at the Apollo, QI, The Last Leg, Mock the Week, 8 Out of 10 Cats and The Mash Report, alongside several acclaimed solo shows. Her 2018 Edinburgh debut Immaculate announced her as a significant new voice, while Again, With Feelings was nominated for Best Show at the 2024 Edinburgh Comedy Awards and earned a five-star review from The Guardian.
So, I arrived at Soho Downstairs completely new to Bohart and left wondering why on earth it had taken me this long.
Borrowing Trouble, her brand-new hour of stand-up, takes its title from a phrase used by Bohart’s father: essentially, why worry about things that haven’t happened yet and which you cannot control? For someone whose own brain has not always been particularly willing to follow that advice, it provides fertile ground.
What follows is an hour of what I can only really describe as confessional comedy: intensely personal experiences offered up to a roomful of strangers, picked apart and turned into something both very funny and unexpectedly relatable.
Bohart is Irish, was brought up Catholic, is queer and has spoken openly about living with OCD, ADHD and serious mental illness. Borrowing Trouble draws on all of this, alongside relationships, family, sexuality, adulthood and the many peculiar social conventions we collectively accept without stopping to ask why.
There is potentially heavy territory here, but the show never feels weighed down by it. Bohart finds humour in experiences that have plainly not always been funny to live through, without either trivialising them or asking the audience for sympathy. The intensely personal continually becomes universal: you don’t need to share Bohart’s particular background to recognise the anxiety, family expectations, social awkwardness and general absurdity of being a person trying to navigate other people.
She can also make the gloriously mundane very funny. Home ownership, neighbours, dogs, weddings and a particularly disastrous encounter with a new television all become comic territory. At one point, Bohart describes herself as a “lesbian screaming in a basement”, a line that feels especially well chosen while sitting in the subterranean Soho Downstairs.
Catherine’s delivery is phenomenally fast. For the first few minutes I felt as though my brain was jogging slightly behind her mouth, trying to catch up before the next punchline arrived. You have to tune into her rhythm. Once you do, the pace becomes part of the pleasure, with jokes, asides and callbacks tumbling over one another.
That speed becomes even more impressive when she abandons the prepared material and starts talking to the audience.
My friend and I both, somewhat unexpectedly, ended up participating.
During a routine involving pelvic physiotherapy, my friend offered an unsolicited but enthusiastic declaration of solidarity from our table. Bohart heard her, stopped and immediately turned the exchange into another laugh.
Later, while discussing weddings and the increasingly elaborate expectations placed upon their guests, Bohart asked whether anyone had ever contributed towards somebody else’s honeymoon.
Reader, I had.
“Costa Rica,” I told her, just as a rather startling green spotlight swung across the room and illuminated me. Bohart duly commented on my sudden radioactive appearance before asking whether the honeymooners were still my friends.
“No.”
Sometimes the audience supplies the punchline for you.
What impressed me about both exchanges was that Bohart never made the audience feel like prey. Her crowd work is playful rather than combative. She listens properly, catches something interesting and instantly finds the funny route through it before slipping effortlessly back into her material. The audience becomes part of the show without becoming its victim.
There is something enormously endearing about Bohart, too. She is candid about parts of her life that could easily be treated with solemnity, but there is no sense of asking for sympathy. Nor does the comedy diminish the seriousness of what she has experienced. Instead, humour becomes a way of taking ownership of it. Bohart jokes about comedy itself as a kind of hour-long therapy and, given her Catholic upbringing, there is something pleasingly confessional and cathartic about the whole enterprise.
I don’t see nearly as much stand-up as I do theatre, and Borrowing Trouble also reminded me just how much I admire the art form.
There is nowhere to hide in stand-up. No character to disappear inside, no company around you, no lavish set, choreography or score to carry a moment. One person walks onto a stage in front of a roomful of strangers and effectively says: I am going to talk to you for the next hour, and I am going to make you laugh.
And then they have to do it.
Bohart did it. The room roared.
This is an extraordinary skill, and seeing somebody do it this well made me think I really ought to watch more comedy. Bohart is quick, candid, warm, fiercely self-aware and genuinely very funny. Even when the subject matter wanders into anxiety, mental illness and all the trouble our brains can borrow before it has even happened, the evening feels joyous rather than heavy.
I went into Borrowing Trouble knowing nothing about Catherine Bohart.
An hour later, glowing faintly green and having publicly disclosed the holiday destination of two former friends, I was very glad to have met her.
Catherine Bohart: Borrowing Trouble plays Soho Theatre until 3 October before touring the UK and Ireland until 25 November 2026.
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