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Rowdy, rude and darkly funny: Scottish standups at the Edinburgh festival

August 14, 2017TheGuardian

Scott Gibson returns to the fringe after winning the best newcomer award in 2016. Can Scotland’s comedians triumph again this time?

Fringe history was made last year when, for the first time, Scottish performers walked off with both major comedy awards: best show and best newcomer. Native talent had seldom bothered the shortlists previously, and some hope this double whammy might inspire emerging acts to follow where – over the last decade – Frankie Boyle, Susan Calman and Kevin Bridges have sporadically led. Others, better versed in local comedians’ vexed relationship with their home-turf festival, sound a note of caution. “There’ll be comics in Scotland who heard the result and went, ‘Brilliant!’,” said 2016 best newcomer Scott Gibson. “And there’ll be others who say, ‘Well, that’s us for another 25 years!’ That’s how we think, and it’s stupid.”

Gein’s Family Giftshop review – purist sketch group’s most memorable show yet

August 14, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The trio play depressed, maladroit losers with absolutely straight faces, and give an object lesson in offbeat humour

Making a virtue out of necessity, I’d call it – except that there’s nothing virtuous about Gein’s Family Giftshop, a sketch group who’ve cornered the market in dark, offbeat humour. Usually a trio on stage (Gein number four, the standup Kiri Pritchard-McLean, directs), they’re down a permanent member this year, after James Meehan pulled out on the eve of the fringe. What others might consider an obstacle, Gein’s exploit as an opportunity for more bad-taste humour, as the last two standing, Ed Easton and Kath Hughes, send up their own isolation and kick bitchily downwards at the ringer they’ve brought in to deputise for their absent friend.

Alex Salmond … Unleashed review – Edinburgh show is all bark and no bite

August 13, 2017TheGuardian

Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh
The former first minister of Scotland and ex-MP promises a political kiss and tell, but while a convivial host, fails to deliver the goods

When the former first minister of Scotland and now ex-MP Alex Salmond announced this last-minute fringe run, it sold out faster than you can say “independence in Europe”. Perhaps punters were seduced by the promise of (as the title runs) “Alex Salmond … Unleashed”. He’s been promising to kiss and tell, hinting on the Today programme at a story involving – of all things – sado-masochism and Kirsty Wark. Sure enough, the show begins (after a rousing reception from the crowd) with Salmond theatrically removing his tie. He’s buttoned up no more, and we buckle up for juicy gossip from behind the scenes of Scottish and UK politics.

But that’s not what we get. Instead, Unleashed is an hour of music, clubbable chat with a special guest, and some reflections on Scotland’s historical ties to Europe. (Each show will have a different theme.) Today’s visitor, greeted with surprise by the crowd, is the “Brexit bulldog”, David Davis – to whom we have to be nice, Salmond instructs us, because they’re pals. If we hadn’t been told, we’d guess from the chummy conversation that follows. Two old guys, two upholstered leather armchairs: think gentleman’s club and you wouldn’t be wide of the mark.

Mat Ewins review – declaration of independence from seriousness

August 13, 2017TheGuardian

Heroes @ The Hive, Edinburgh
Running against the prevailing trend for sincerity in comedy, Mat Ewins’ Indiana Jones-inspired show is a paean to daftness, fabrication and windups, with a terrific gag rate

“You might as well call it the Edinburgh whinge festival,” says Mat Ewins, towards the end of his new show. Sincerity and self-disclosure are the new comedy virtues, he protests – whither now the incorrigible joker, committed not to truth-telling, but windups, pranks and silly jokes? Well, Ewins’ show Adventureman 7 (don’t ask) might just be good enough to propel sheer idiocy back into fashion. It’s an absolute hoot, a DIY Indiana Jones spoof constructed from digital animations, good-natured crowd interaction and a droopy stick-on moustache. Oh, and the most brilliant wool-over-the-audience’s-eyes moment we’re likely to experience anywhere at this year’s festival.

From the venue (a subterranean bunker with bad sightlines) to the gimcrack videos, the show could hardly be more homespun. Ewins, runs the subtext, is a doofus with time on his hands, and he’s used it to imagine an alter ego for himself, a novice treasure-hunter charged with retrieving a lost amulet, and thereby saving his museum workplace from closure. Along the way, Ewins resists not one opportunity to detour up unexpected byways, whether that’s leading us in a shanty singalong with very unlikely lyrics, conducting a hazard perception test with a homicidal motorist in the audience, or promoting his new compound crockery product, “the Cuplate”.

Steen Raskopoulos review – fruitful but uneasy audience participation

August 13, 2017TheGuardian

Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh
Not every audience member press-ganged into taking part in the Australian’s sketches has the confidence to keep up with a stellar performer

Tricky business, this audience participation. A whole genre of comedy has bloomed over the last few years, propelling this most awkward element of live entertainment centre-stage. Adam Riches is its most notorious exponent; Aussie act Steen Raskopoulos is closing in and returns (after a best newcomer nomination in 2014) with another neatly constructed set in which the audience play key roles. It’s good fun, at least in proportion to the enthusiasm of Raskopoulos’s volunteers (and I use that word loosely). But tonight, they’re not always happy, which made me uneasy in turn – voyeur to the public discomfort of others being itself an uncomfortable role in which to be cast.

There is, I think, a disingenuousness at the heart of the enterprise. “I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I personally wouldn’t do,” Raskopoulos tells us. But he’s a professional extrovert; his audience, presumably, aren’t. His show unfolds a series of sketches that resolve into a story. A bereaved horse grieves his slain stablemate. A naive kid (returning from previous Raskopoulos sets) celebrates his birthday alone. A driving lesson handbrake-turns into a bank robbery.

Edinburgh comedy review – Brexit, Trump and sex-mad chimpanzees

August 13, 2017TheGuardian

Reginald D Hunter spurns good taste, Sara Pascoe goes solo, and Jan Ravens is everyone else

Top calls in this year’s fringe comedy bingo – where punters make a mental tick each time jokes on the same subjects occur in shows – are (as you might expect) Donald Trump, Brexit, running through wheat fields and, more randomly, bonobo chimps. Cue filthy jokes, as bonobos, like humans, have sex for fun as well as procreation.

Another on this year’s card is privilege – in all its forms – as comedians examine some of today’s big issues, and foremost among those who tackle race head-on is Reginald D Hunter, an African American from Georgia but transplanted here 20 years ago. He’s therefore ideally placed to cast a beady eye on the British, as he does to great effect in Some People vs Reginald D Hunter (Assembly Hall).

Ravens conjures up Kirsty Wark, Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel and ‘wee gobshite’ Nicola Sturgeon

Trumped out: why the fringe can’t keep up with 2017

August 13, 2017TheGuardian

From Trumpageddon to Brexit: The Musical, many would-be topical crowdpleasers at this year’s fringe can’t match the manic pace of real-life news events

This would be a bad time to try to hire a blond fright wig from a theatrical costumier. The ones that aren’t being worn, combed forward, by actors playing satirical versions of Donald Trump are, hand-brushed upwards, on the heads of performers sending up Boris Johnson.

With thousands of shows on offer at the Edinburgh fringe, audiences are inevitably drawn – before the reviews and prizes come in – to productions with easily graspable themes that can be spread to the like-minded through social media.

Phoebe Walsh: ‘We’ve all spent five minutes looking for the right emoji’

August 12, 2017TheGuardian

She self-eviscerates in the style of tragic Instagram feeds and harvests jokes from unsent tweets. But comedian Phoebe Walsh’s twitchy social-media spin is revitalising singleton standup at Edinburgh this year

During her debut solo show, I’ll Have What She’s Having, comic Phoebe Walsh rattles off an onslaught of self-eviscerating one-liners in the style of a pointy-fingered club comic. She is the “sassy best-friend character in her own life story”. She is “Pocahontas on the streets, Grandmother Willow from Pocahontas between the sheets”. She is, quite simply, “Miss Selfridge”.

Much of Walsh’s set taps into the online trend for self-absorption and self-deprecation. It recalls popular social-media accounts that trade in the bleak realities of being a gross, lonely human on the internet, the antithesis of the humourless humble-bragging endemic. She channels the essence of So Sad Today, Expectation v Reality, Girl With No Job, The Fat Jewish and your vacant reflection in the black screen between Netflix episodes. Such is her zeitgeisty and somewhat unhinged take on the single-girl-in-the-big-city schtick, she is also probably not for everyone. “You’ll either relate to what she’s saying or feel glad that you don’t,” reads the show’s blurb.

It’s uncool to take about how much we are on our iPhones, but the internet is always the elephant in the room

Alexei Sayle, Dolly Parton and payback time for critics: Edinburgh festival 2017 shows – in pictures

August 12, 2017TheGuardian

The Edinburgh festival 2017 runs the gamut from immersive political theatre to gender-questioning dance to standup comebacks – here’s a selection of shows photographed by Murdo MacLeod