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Rose Matafeo: Sassy Best Friend review – fun-filled satire on romcoms

August 6, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The comedian keeps things upbeat as she lightly interrogates Hollywood cliche and the role models on offer to young women

Rose Matafeo has watched a lot of romcoms, and decided that she’s classic “sassy best friend” material – hence the title of this new show. But what does that mean, and is it a good thing to be? A year on from the New Zealander’s whirlwind fringe debut with Finally Dead, this latest offering interrogates – with the lightest of touches – the personalities on offer to women, and one way in particular that those personalities can be tampered with.

Joseph Morpurgo: Hammerhead review – uproariously funny Q&A spoof

August 6, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Morpurgo’s ludicrous satire on the post-show chat is so full of invention you could watch it twice and not stop laughing

Joseph Morpurgo made a name for himself with a pair of high-concept multimedia comedy shows, the second of which, Soothing Sounds for Baby (2015), is routinely talked about as one of the great Edinburgh comedy award near-misses. He returns with another sui generis offering, Hammerhead, spoofing the conventions of the post-show Q&A. I doubted how well it was doing this over the opening stages, which are big, brash and broad – as is the whole show. But I was won over once I accepted that Hammerhead follows no one’s rules but its own, and began savouring the silliness, structural intricacy and sheer bountiful invention of Morpurgo’s enterprise.

Sara Pascoe: LadsLadsLads review – breakup tales from a woman reborn

August 5, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The whipsmart standup overthinks, overshares and delivers a winningly funny show that finds the humour in heartbreak

Call it reinvention, or call it back to basics, but Sara Pascoe’s Edinburgh fringe return – after a couple of years writing and promoting her book Animal – marks a departure from the shows that made her name. Those were anthropology masquerading as comedy, and wore their erudition on their sleeve. This one, entitled LadsLadsLads, is more introspective and treads ground more familiar for standup, as it chronicles Pascoe’s efforts to be happily single after the breakup of a four-year relationship. It’s still whipsmart, though, and winningly funny, as Pascoe overthinks and overshares in the name of our entertainment.

Bigfoot and me: Roddy Bottum on his avant garde monster opera

August 5, 2017TheGuardian

He was one of the first openly gay men in metal. Now, after losing everything in a house fire, Faith No More’s Roddy Bottum is bankrolling an opera featuring crystal-meth arias and interspecies duets

In a top-floor flat overlooking Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, Roddy Bottum is talking me through his fringe show Sasquatch: The Opera. Bottum is the keyboard player in Faith No More, whose twisted take on hard rock propelled them to global success in the 90s, and he’s at the festival with a cast of opera singers and experimenters from New York’s avant garde performance art scene. Though it’s a few days until curtain-up, they want to give me a preview. In true fringe style they perform four scenes right here in the living room, to music played on his laptop.

Did Axl talk to me about being gay? Not so much

Edinburgh festival 2017: 10 shows to see

August 4, 2017TheGuardian

A puppet blockbuster, a Bigfoot opera and a Northern Soul dance marathon all feature in the lineup of the 70th Edinburgh festivalEdinburgh Playhouse Continue reading…

Comic Rose Matafeo: ‘I definitely probably have a moderate amount of talent’

August 3, 2017TheGuardian

Since first picking up the mic at 15, the standup has tap-danced, done Aerosmith karaoke and starred in her own TV show. So why does she want to disappear offstage?

Was there ever a greater discrepancy between talent and confidence? Rose Matafeo, at 25, is an award-winning standup, a TV star in her native New Zealand and made a striking Edinburgh fringe debut last summer. That show wasn’t perfect, but Matafeo’s force of personality – dominant, dorky-excitable – was a sight to behold. Here was a comedian whose power couldn’t be denied. Except by Matafeo herself, it turns out, whose stellar charisma on stage is matched by subterranean self-esteem off it.

This becomes clear over coffee as Matafeo girds herself for a return to Edinburgh with her new show, Sassy Best Friend. When I ask what it is about her comedy that is winning such acclaim, Matafeo squirms with discomfort. “That’s the most uncomfortable position to put someone like me in,” she says. “I’m not going to be forced to answer that.”

Sam Simmons review – sublime oddity from aggressively silly standup

August 2, 2017TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
By his own standards, the 2015 Edinburgh Comedy award-winner plays it relatively straight in his new show – but there are satisfyingly daft moments

‘There are pockets of joy,” says Sam Simmons, peering out over his audience, but he also claims to see mainly confused faces. This is what the aggressively silly Aussie comic does: berates us for our under-appreciation, feigns his own failure. It’s a tactic, of course, to emphasise his weirdness, to ratchet up the absurdity and alienation of an already absurd act. And it hasn’t done Simmons any harm: he won the Edinburgh Comedy award two summers ago, and is, if tonight’s mantra is to be believed, “doing really well overseas”. (He’s now based in LA.)

It’s a risky tactic, though – in that, if you tell an audience often enough that they are not enjoying themselves, they might start to believe it. That was partly my experience at this performance of his new show A-K, when Simmons’s compulsive commentary on how his jokes were being received overshadowed the jokes themselves. That left the show, which arrives at the Edinburgh festival next week, a bit disjointed. It doesn’t help that this is Simmons’s most loosely conceived offering: there are fewer props, gimmicks and convoluted set-pieces, and it more closely resembles standup than the carnivals of oddity he has served up in the past.

Stars from comedy’s punk past return to the Edinburgh fringe

July 22, 2017TheGuardian

They were at the vanguard of political comedy. Now Alexei Sayle, Craig Ferguson and Sue Perkins are heading back to the festival, as it celebrates its 70th birthday

Unknown talents and student hopefuls head for the Edinburgh festival fringe at this time of year, aiming to break into the entertainment industry. This summer, however, a loud and anarchic blast from comedy’s punk past is also on the bill.

A slew of stars, including Alexei Sayle, a comic hero of the 1980s, and Sue Perkins, who first made it big at the festival 20 or so years ago, are returning to try their luck as the fringe celebrates its 70th birthday.

‘We haven’t made a profit for five years’: risky business at Edinburgh fringe

July 19, 2017TheGuardian

Running a festival venue is about more than booking acts and selling tickets. From converting lecture rooms to spending £25,000 on Astroturf, we reveal the costs of putting on a show

Ten years ago, at the Edinburgh festival, Anthony Alderson became the not very proud owner of 44 Vauxhall Astras. Alderson, the Pleasance’s director, had bought 22 of the cars from a scrapyard for a show called Auto Auto, staged in the Grand, the largest of the Pleasance venues. But it turned out they were the wrong kind of Vauxhall Astra. The show turned cars into comedy percussion instruments and these all had sun-roofs. So Alderson had to buy another 22. “I think the scrap dealer thought he’d hit the goldmine,” he recalls ruefully.

One year, a large dance company made back the costs of their entire Edinburgh run with a single gig in South America

It’s tough to run a venue, and it’s getting tougher. People do it because they are addicted to Edinburgh in August

‘I had to relearn how to be funny’: comedian Lou Conran on her show about baby loss

July 17, 2017TheGuardian

Lou Conran terminated her pregnancy after five months when she discovered her baby would not survive outside the womb. Now, she is telling her story at the Edinburgh fringe

“Nobody has cried through the previews,” says Lou Conran, “so it can’t be that bad.” The standup, who has supported Sarah Millican and is an Edinburgh festival veteran, is pleased with the warm-ups for her new fringe comedy show, especially as her subject matter lends itself more easily to tears than laughs.

Just over a year ago, when she was five months pregnant, Conran discovered that her baby had a condition she could not survive. After an induced labour, her daughter was stillborn. “An empowering yet painfully funny show about life and ultimately the taboo of death,” states the flyer. Reactions to the concept, she knows, will be mixed. “My mum just said, ‘Oh my god. What are you doing? How on earth are you going to make that funny?’”

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