Griff Rhys Jones arrives on stage with the easy authority of someone who has been performing for decades. He has built his career on charm, improvisation and comic authority, but Cat’s Pyjamas exposes the limits of that formula when the material is weak. Billed as an evening of stories, observations and reflections, the show is little more than a ragbag of personal anecdotes delivered without shape or bite. The result is an amiable but underpowered two hours that rarely provoked more than a polite chuckle from the audience.
Much of the evening circles familiar terrain. Rhys Jones riffs on modern irritations, technology, and ageing. There are observations on memory lapses and midnight train journeys. Yet none of these subjects are developed beyond the obvious. What might have been sharp sketches become rambling stories, dragging out trivial details without escalation or surprise.
The credibility problem compounds the weakness of the jokes. At the performance under review, Rhys Jones launched into a story about travelling on the London underground “earlier that day”. He even produced a photograph as supposed proof. But it fell flat because it was patently untrue: the show was bang in the middle of September 2025’s Tube strikes, when no trains were running. The photograph clearly pre-dated the show. Rather than pivoting or improvising to acknowledge the obvious contradiction, even when someone in the audience shouted out ‘But there’s a tube strike today’, Rhys Jones ploughed on, continuing to pretend the incident had happened that day. He lacked the dexterity to laugh off the obvious falsehood. What could have been rescued with a quip instead became a moment that undermined trust in the rest of his material.
The staging is stripped back to the essentials: a stool, a microphone, and a screen with occasional powerpoint slides, which means there is nowhere to hide when the jokes falter. Strong stand-ups use such intimacy to sharpen their punchlines and test their audience. Here, the lack of structure and overlong tangents simply expose how little substance the stories contain. By the second half, energy had drained from the room. Tales about modern frustrations stretched on long past their natural lifespan.
There is still technical polish. Rhys Jones can flip into a voice or caricature at will, and his timing occasionally lands a line. But those moments are rare and not enough to sustain the evening. Instead of feeling like crafted comedy, Cat’s Pyjamas comes across as a loosely assembled after-dinner speech, reliant on goodwill from an audience familiar with his earlier work.
Rhys Jones retains stage presence, but without sharper material or the agility to adapt, presence alone cannot keep the show afloat.