Tape Face strikes again, TV cult and internet sensation Limmy uploads his videos, while Owen Roberts lets a six-year-old write his show for this year’s fringe.
All photography by Murdo MacLeod
Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Matafeo’s neurosis, intelligence and flamboyant sense of her own ridiculousness make her a near-perfect comedian
. Now she explains why she’s never been quite right for romantic lead. Horndog is a history of the New Zealand comic’s brushes with love and sex – and, having kissed nine people in her life (she’s 26), that easily fits into a fringe hour. And what an hour it is: another storming set from a woman whose neuroses, intelligence and flamboyant sense of her own ridiculousness make her a near-perfect comedian.
There are fewer frills or set-pieces than in Matafeo’s previous work. Horndog is just a volcanic eruption of standup, occasionally embellished by loud blasts of audiovisual. We are told she has recently experienced a breakup, which isn’t the show’s theme but its context. Why, Matafeo wants to know, is she so obsessive about relationships? Wherefore her peculiar definition of horniness: “Girls putting 100% into something that’s not worth it”?
Continue ReadingPlan your schedule with our roundup of top shows, ordered by start time. This page will be updated daily throughout the festival Continue reading…
Continue ReadingPleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Fran Bushe’s comedy uses glitter and smart songs to advocate better understanding of sex for women
Fran Bushe wants to fix sex. Armed with glitter, songs and a diagram of her vulva, she’s on a mission to kickstart her own libido and change how we think and talk about female pleasure – and its opposite – in the bedroom. After trying and failing to enjoy sex for 15 years and facing a parade of unhelpful advice from GPs, Bushe is taking matters into her own hands.
Though, of course, it’s not that simple. Bushe wants a quick fix, a happy ending, but much of her solo show is about how life – and sex – don’t work that way. At least not in the sexually unequal society we still live in. Ad Libido is unapologetically personal, to the extent of including intimate snippets from Bushe’s teenage diary, yet it also lightly suggests the external pressures that many women feel when making decisions about sex. Often throughout Bushe’s quest it becomes as much about soothing the feelings of male partners as trying to make sex pleasurable for herself.
Continue ReadingPleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Fran Bushe’s comedy uses glitter and smart songs to advocate better understanding of sex for women
Fran Bushe wants to fix sex. Armed with glitter, songs and a diagram of her vulva, she’s on a mission to kickstart her own libido and change how we think and talk about female pleasure – and its opposite – in the bedroom. After trying and failing to enjoy sex for 15 years and facing a parade of unhelpful advice from GPs, Bushe is taking matters into her own hands.
Though, of course, it’s not that simple. Bushe wants a quick fix, a happy ending, but much of her solo show is about how life – and sex – don’t work that way. At least not in the sexually unequal society we still live in. Ad Libido is unapologetically personal, to the extent of including intimate snippets from Bushe’s teenage diary, yet it also lightly suggests the external pressures that many women feel when making decisions about sex. Often throughout Bushe’s quest it becomes as much about soothing the feelings of male partners as trying to make sex pleasurable for herself.
Continue ReadingUnderbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh
Damien Warren-Smith’s alter ego delivers a drama masterclass, leading us from clownish chaos to feats of comic genius
‘Theatre is dying. Garry is our only hope,” we’re told. Arriving in Edinburgh with considerable buzz from the Melbourne and Brighton festivals, Damien Warren-Smith’s show – like Jon Pointing’s last year – is comic catnip for theatre people, and a hoot for everyone else. Warren-Smith plays Garry Starr: gangly of limb, quivering with sincerity, and frequently stripped down to nothing but the ruff around his neck. He’s here to rescue forsaken theatre by demonstrating every one of its genres in 60 minutes. He manages 13, by which time the clownish chaos has reached a dizzying pitch.
The idea, he tells us, is to breathe life back into an art form that’s been hollowed out by his bete noire, and supposed former employer, the RSC. So here is Starr playing Pinter with an audience stooge, and being very particular about the famous pause. Euro-theatre is represented by a contemporary-dance Kafka. Slapstick descends into barely choreographed violence involving Starr, four punters and several floppy foam pipes.
Continue ReadingUnderbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh
Damien Warren-Smith’s alter ego delivers a drama masterclass, leading us from clownish chaos to feats of comic genius
‘Theatre is dying. Garry is our only hope,” we’re told. Arriving in Edinburgh with considerable buzz from the Melbourne and Brighton festivals, Damien Warren-Smith’s show – like Jon Pointing’s last year – is comic catnip for theatre people, and a hoot for everyone else. Warren-Smith plays Garry Starr: gangly of limb, quivering with sincerity, and frequently stripped down to nothing but the ruff around his neck. He’s here to rescue forsaken theatre by demonstrating every one of its genres in 60 minutes. He manages 13, by which time the clownish chaos has reached a dizzying pitch.
The idea, he tells us, is to breathe life back into an art form that’s been hollowed out by his bete noire, and supposed former employer, the RSC. So here is Starr playing Pinter with an audience stooge, and being very particular about the famous pause. Euro-theatre is represented by a contemporary-dance Kafka. Slapstick descends into barely choreographed violence involving Starr, four punters and several floppy foam pipes.
Continue ReadingThe character comic switches roles like a regenerating Time Lord in her new Edinburgh show, Faces of Grace – from a wannable Love Island contestant to a cat-loving loner
It became clear to Emma Sidi this year that her interpretive dance about NHS waiting times would have to go. The 27-year-old comic, who has been seen in W1A and the BBC3 vlogging satire Pls Like, performed the sketch in January as part of a work-in-progress show in a studio space in London; Michael McIntyre was hogging the larger room next door.
Many comedians destined for Edinburgh each August put in a solid 10 or 11 months of workshopping beforehand. Sidi knows the drill, having taken two acclaimed sets to the fringe. Character Breakdown, in 2015, saw her play six different roles, including a feminism professor whose lecture, delivered entirely in Spanish, was prone to stray from the topic. At one point, she relates the tale of being interrupted by Dobby the House Elf during some “solo masturbación.” Sidi’s 2016 show, Telenovela, ended with the audience building giant foil wings for her to fly away.
Continue ReadingThe writer of The Vicar of Dibley and Mrs Brown’s Boys discusses the funny side of living with the illness and his new Edinburgh show, Incurable Optimist
“Good news,” the comedy writer Paul Mayhew-Archer likes to say of the moment he learned he had Parkinson’s disease. “The neurologist said I could expect five good years.” There is, of course, some bad news too. “The diagnosis was seven years ago.” “You find it quite difficult to smile, don’t you?” the neurologist said to him at that fateful meeting. “Well, that could be because you just told me I’ve got Parkinson’s,” Mayhew-Archer replied.
It’s tempting to fill this entire article with Mayhew-Archer’s gags about his Parkinson’s. The fact that it takes him so long to fumble for his wallet that he never has to pay for a drink in a pub. Or the irritation that all his limbs get stiffer except for the one he’d occasionally like to get stiff. Immediately after his diagnosis, he decided he could either laugh or cry about Parkinson’s. He chose to laugh, and is now taking the one-man show he’s developed around the disease to the Edinburgh festival.
I have more difficulty getting out of the bath. On the other hand, I quite like being in the bath
Continue ReadingPark theatre, London
The politics of comedy is examined through the prism of faltering father and son comedians played by Les Dennis and Blake Harrison
‘I realised why I never liked jokes,” says a character in Danny Robins’s new play, channelling comedian-of-the-moment Hannah Gadsby. “It’s because they’re almost always based on a lie.” So should standups make people laugh, or tell their truth? And what if the standup in question – a TV superstar, loved by millions – is a closet bigot? That’s the stuff of End of the Pier, an argument about comedy that flares occasionally into dramatic life.
It begins in the Blackpool home of ex-comic Bobby (rumpled Les Dennis), whose career was destroyed when a Guardian journalist, no less, shopped him for telling racist jokes. Today, he’s visited by his son Michael (The Inbetweeners’ Blake Harrison), a primetime comedy star now fretting over the career-threatening fallout from a stag night gone awry. Enter Michael’s snooty wife Jenna (Tala Gouveia), and the stage is set for schematic debates about class, comedy and PC, and plenty of improbable exposition, as family members spout backstory at one another as if they’ve never met before.
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