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You know who else started out joking about pigeons? Hannibal Buress. But Buress was joking about kicking them and selling T-shirts about them. This young bloke has other ideas.
A Best Newcomer nominee at this year’s Fringe, Toussaint Douglass introduces himself to us, having grown up in the Lewisham borough of London, raised by his 87-year-old grandmother, herself an immigrant from the Caribbean island of Dominica.
Douglass doesn’t suffer from generational trauma but from oddness, and has decided to solve his introverted nature by joining a bird-watching group. Hence, the pigeons. He involves the audience with one particularly robotic pigeon to start; later he role plays with an audience member in an attempt to better understand his own relationship with his dad. And by learning about how pigeons mate for life, he hopes to get a handle on his eight-year relationship with his girlfriend, a clinical psychologist with whom he feels more like he’s in a boss-employee arrangement.
Douglass wishes he had the confidence of a pigeon in a train station. He may never have the confidence of pigeons who fought in the war, nor may he ever earn “dying alone money.” But at this newfound stage in his life, that might be the least of his worries.
Toussaint Douglass: Accessible Pigeon Material plays Pleasance Bunker One through Aug. 24, 2025.
