Award-winning character comedian Lorna Rose Treen returns to the Soho Theatre this September with her critically acclaimed second hour, 24 Hour Diner People – a nonsense-soaked, joy-fuelled live-cartoon, a character comedy love letter to the gloriously ridiculous.
Following the sell-out success of her 2025 Fringe run (selling out 30 shows and receiving countless glowing reviews), and her debut Skin Pigeon (which sold-out 2 Fringe and 2 Soho Theatre runs, earned her Chortle’s Best Newcomer Award and saw The Guardian hail her as “a major new voice in character comedy”), Lorna returns with an even more ambitious and imaginative show, set in a liminal American diner where logic is left at the door and absurdity rules the menu.
In 2023 The Sun said Lorna’s Dave Joke of the Fringe winning gag “killed comedy”, so this year, by setting her show in one location, she is back to kill theatre too. A second love letter to the ridiculous (“I’m so in love I can’t stop writing letters,” she says), 24 Hour Diner People offers up a full-fat collection of eccentric, escapist, and delightfully silly characters – all served with a side of proper jokes. Expect to meet a waitress who dreams of flying, a trucker with unusually long arms, a woman who’s kept her umbilical cord, a 1960s spy on a caffeine high, and a teenager giddy from her first kiss – all somehow coexisting in a strange, time-warped roadside diner.
“I wanted to build the nonsense into a world,” says Treen. “The diner is a place out of time – a fantasy Americana seen through the eyes of a Midlands-bred woman raised on Mean Girls and telly, not travel. It’s the perfect stage for messing about with identity, nostalgia, and reality, especially in an age where everything feels online, uncanny and just a little too curated.”
The show is directed by long-time collaborator Jonathan Oldfield (BBC New Comedian Finalist 2024, Frankie Monroe, Lucy Pearman, Alice Cockayne), and features music composed by Jonno (from acclaimed sketch group Sheeps), and a set designed by Jimmy Slim – whose surreal visual work previously brought life to Skin Pigeon and has worked with Jazz Emu, Sam Campbell, Ania Magliano, and Channel 4’s Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.
Treen’s passion for creating “weird women” is front and centre, continuing her mission to give under-heard female tropes their comic due. Every character she plays is a woman – sometimes subversive, sometimes chaotic, always funny. “I like taking a woman who might traditionally be voiceless in a story – ‘the wife’, for example – and giving her a stupid voice, and a ridiculous monologue, and letting her be the funniest thing on stage.”
Alongside the show, Treen has been working on series two of her acclaimed parody radio programme Time of the Week for BBC Radio 4 – co-created with Jonathan Oldfield and starring Sian Clifford (Fleabag) – which recently won British Comedy Guide’s Best Radio Sketch Show 2024 and has been nominated for the ARIA’s Best Comedy Award 2025.
Lorna Rose Treen is an award-winning comedian, actor, improviser and writer from Redditch, West Midlands, now based in London. Her 2023 debut character comedy show Skin Pigeon sold out in a week, received 8+ five-star reviews, two sell-out transfers to Soho Theatre, a second sell-out Fringe run in 2024, and won Dave’s Best Joke of the Fringe. It was named one of The Telegraph’s Top 5 Comedy Shows of 2023.
She has a thriving online following with over 180,000 Instagram followers and 141,000 TikTok followers, where her viral parody street interviews and sketch content regularly reach millions.
She is co-creator and star of the surreal parody woman’s radio show Time of the Week (BBC R4). Her voice can also be heard in The Sound of Us (Jazz Emu, BBC R4), Nora Meadows’ Week of Wellness (Katy Wix, BBC R4), and on-screen appearances include Goblin Solutions (Channel 4), The Emily Atack Show (ITV), and BBC Three’s New Comedy Awards. Lorna is also a founding member of the hit improvised true crime mockumentary show Criminally Untrue.
