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Monkey Barrel 1
Aug 18-21, 23-27 (12:30)

Ligonem Ligonem Vocat

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MC Hammersmith is a marvel & a geezer! He’s a pure Ego Spengler kinda dude with a ridculous gift. Nah then, according to peer-review’d neuroscience papers, we only use 10 percent of our brains. When we figure out what the other 90 percent is capable of I’m sure we’ll be off in intradimensional space trips & sh!t, but til then it’ll be down to pioneers like MC Hammersmith cracking the rocky crusted veneer of the psyche & excavating each half percent’s worth of mental possibility.

“Just like a window I’m an absolute ledge.”

This is what this plate-spinning mental acrobat actually does. He, & at the same time; analyzes a room, creates a plot around suggestions given from the audience, maintains a perpetual motionary flawless flow of freestyle hip-hop, & makes it all reyt funny at the same time! It’s absolute genius, like! Alright, his rapping is pretty monotone, but the way his mind manages to pull funny puns out of the aether is proper mental.

His show consists of several segments, a couple of which aren’t quite as spontaneous as he suggests, I’m thinking’, but it’s all very good & very, very clever indeed. We have questions for MC Hammersmith, for example, extracted from audience members prior to entry, such as today’s ‘is it cool to like Eurovision’ & ‘why does Mona Lisa have a subtle smirky smile,’ which he’d weave into his rhapsodic tapestry with ridiculous skill. Another segment saw him rapping to stuff from people’s pockets that they held in the air as he stalk’d the aisles among the seats – including a rubik’s cube.

“You look like you could snap me just like a poppadom.”

I remember chatting to a hip-hop guy at some poetry slam in Brighton about 20 years ago, & I ask’d him what’s the secret to freestylin’, & he said always get the second rhyme first. I tried it a couple of times myself, but couldn’t really manage it, it’s well hard, like, but MC Hammersmith is a total supersensei in the field, its quite astonishing. Over a full hour it’s a little one-trick ponyish to tell you the truth, but it’s all smashing fun & proper esoteric – he would have got burnt at the stake for that kind of malarky three or four centuries back!

Damo

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Pleasance Courtyard
Aug 18-27 (19:40)

Cetera Desunt

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The Japanese-learning, Latin-dancing universalist that is Darren Harriot & his recently grown walrus-tooth-tache, is a Brummie by birth, now firmly ensconc’d in NW London, has created a full hour show, the vibe of which was more like meeting your mate down the pub to hear his latest scrapes & adventures, rather than be entertain’d by a maestro at the peak of his powers. The whole experience was amiable, more than funny; & generally a flatlining of energy rather than those peaky funbursts of comedy shows gone by, whose only troughs are when we draw breath.

A good share of the aforemention’d scrapes came from his experiences on TV gameshows, quite a few of them, on which he says he always came last. It was such micronegativities like this which sort of stuck in the show like a tick pick’d up in some long highland grass somewhere, sending in the Limes Disease & knocking out the show. I mean, his delivery is great, & to be fair his topics were quite varied, with only the occisional nod of appreciation towards his ethnicity, such as attacking the mundanity of the BAME acronym, & reminiscing over the 2011 London riots. There was also the obvious joke about his family moving to the Black Country from Jamaica, which I’d told myself was coming about 2 or 3 minutes before he told it.

In the final reckoning, it wasn’t that Roadman was bad, but it wasn’t very good either, & perhaps that’s even worse. I mean, I love getting stuck into some of the more primitive comedy showcases at the Fringe – y’know, first timers coming up to Edinburgh with ten minutes of material – often awful, but it’s like going to watch League 2 football, or summat, you get right into it & start cheering & stuff. But with Darren, I just watch’d, & listen’d, as his well-reputed comedy vehicle drove right into thick traffic form’d by a certain lack of alchemical magic to the fashioning of his show.

Damo

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Pleasance Courtyard
Aug 17th – 27th (19:10)

Consilio Manuque

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If you want to see an absolutely perfect show at the Edinburgh Fringe this year go and take in Josh Wellers magically funny ‘Age Against the Machine’, I know a hilarious name, well done Josh and here we went. I find that the Pleasance Courtyard has some interesting interior decor, shaping up a crowd in a great mood. Its various rooms are dotted around the complex. I always love the sloping seats that we stepped into with their enticing held intimacy that Josh made e bee line for straight away he gobbled up its possibilities.

The welcome kicks in when the music dies down, we quieten and the stage goes black; a voice fills the room introducing the coming act, these three things work great every time bringing so much of a sequence to events to come and give’s a shot of adrenalin. So on pops the soon to be master of ceremonies Josh Weller, the shows writer and performer.

With his very intense presence immediately obvious was the size of his brain, he had written this in the name of music, and with music as a strong aid a story came through in his (famous) failure to become successful as a musician. His gloriously dedication attention to detail alone was commendably verbalised and could have covered an entire show. In fact every little detail he left behind could cover a lot of theatre, which I think is cousin to comedy because surely both are the act you see before you.

His readiness even shone from his eyes as he would peer at us over his charming and friendly looking glasses. He was able to be genuine on stage; that may sound simple but is hard to try. He did it in a way that paved milestones of perfect gags, punch lines and a willingness for gesticulation and ruckus singing.

He has led an interesting life from what he told us, setting about following his then young heart. His love for music took him on a long journey; going to London, gigging in the extreme, pursuing being signed (which he managed to do), all of it seemed to be with the good grace of a sense of humour (though in Age against…his wit may have been sharpened with age).

Very fabulous, very prepared totally condensing and relaxed as a performer taking us in to the depths of the Music business and its calamity as a protagonist of destroying creativity. I thanked him internally for all the heads up warning about the real life of a musician.

His cutting jokes created genuine laughter as he reached every level he could find in his Fringe debut. It was blended in all of his ways, putting up pictures, art photographs and pivotal albums covers of the eighties. Of himself as a youngster (who believed totally that he would make it), he looked and dressed to a quirky beat (all his own) and took to an extent of putting together a greatly piercing sheer mass of entertaining befudgery.

Finding nothing down in any of his fast paced hour I can say that this invitation for you to go and see him in his role as master of ceremonies, a humble solo show with ready genius, physically, mentally and spiritually on fire and just lovable, is one that will melt your heart in laughter.

Daniel Donnelly

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The Counting House
Aug 18-24 (16:15)

Nulla Dies Sine Linea

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‘If life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ as post-disaster life advice is all fine and well provided you have at least a little sugar to sprinkle in with all that tart juice, otherwise all you’re left with is a glass of wince inducing liquid which’ll have your guests puckering their faces and nodding and smiling in fake approval. Thankfully, our purveyor of ‘Ellenade’ bounces onto the stage to welcome us, looking like a ‘primary teacher, ‘aged child actress’, or indeed a very English reincarnation of Kristen Bell from The Good Place. It’s a boon to her show that she carries this air of lightness around her, as her pre-mid life crisis material themes around a ‘big break up’ serial killers, creepy men with vans, pervy ticket conductors and a particularly neat little punchline about Hitlers favourite place in England.

The self-deprecation woven into every anecdote prevents this slice of post-break up London life straying into bitter faux-misandry. Indeed, she spends the first 10 minutes of her set discussing the meticulously planned ‘break up date’ of herself and her partner of 5yrs, complete with matching innapropriate, literal, parting gifts. This kind of whimsy keeps full blown misanthropy at bay, and allowed the audience to relax into 45 minutes of easy charm and chat, bantering delivered at a whipsmart pace we discover is an unexpected benefit of 5yrs of unsuccessful anxiety therapy.

The mid-afternoon crowd are lulled into false senses of security for brief spells, though there’s always a luridly technicolor sexual metaphor waiting to jolt them back into the chaos of Ellen’s love life. I’ll let you use your imagination to decipher what the phrase ‘taste the rainbow’.was deployed to represent.

It’s a polished act, even if the ground is well worn, as Sasha herself points out, she spent the last 5yrs as a stand up in a long term relationship, mocking the unfortunate fellow performers who used dating app anecdotes as the backbone for their sets. Ellen’s self-disclosed anxiety results in nice rapid fire delivery which moves the show along at pace, and keeps the groups of clearly newly ‘singled’ friends laughing away in recognition of the travails of a modern online singleton.

Ultimately though the show concludes on a cliffhanger choice which Eddie Izzard would no doubt appreciate, ‘pizza or death’. Sasha Ellen is of course alive to tell the tale, which thankfully means that she got to have her pizza, and eat it too.

Ewan Law

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Pleasance Bunker
Aug 2-27 (20:10)

Instar Omnium

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Andre de Freitas limps onto stage with a bashful grin on his face and opens his set by apologising, and explaining that he’d been out celebrating a 5 star review the night before. This had, ‘of course’ he explained resulted in him injuring himself. ‘The Portuguese believe that whenever something good happens, something bad is sure to follow soon after’. It’s this deep rooted Calvinistic pessimism, so shared by The Scots with our ‘If we score against Brazil, we’ll end up losing by 3’ attitude to life, and football, which brings out the kind of unashamed and un-romanticised raw, dark, material into Andre’s set. He handles these themes with such a deft, light, and charming manner, that he is able to make his way through the audience over the course of this hour, reeling each of them in hand luring them into laughing at masturbation at funerals, homelessness, sucidality, schizophrenia, and becoming a sex worker. Given the themes being covered in the show it’s a sign of the incredible maturity of this performance that it feels like ‘a normal stand up show’ for a broad range of demographics, and this is evidenced by Andre’s success in capturing every single member of the crowds attention, admiration, and affection before the time is out. In one particularly hilarious exchange, he even manages to accidentally get his undercover PR Agent in stitches.

He spends a significant portion of the show pondering, and discussing, what it means to be Portuguese, to come from a ‘culture of sadness’. Here the commonality with Scottish self-deprecation, gallows humour, and making light work of generational trauma allows him to quickly pull the audience into his cultural perspective. It’s genuinely fascinating hearing him discuss the changes in his own self-identity which occur when speaking, performing, and even having sex, in English. He riffs on polyglot trauma-escapism, the flirty colonial approach of Spanish imperialists in South America, and cunning use of the Portuguese word for ‘proctologist’ as a self-defence technique on New York’s subways. There is also possibly the funniest, bizarrely heart-warming, 10 minutes spent discussing a mans love affair with a table lamp. Really, you’ll need to trust me on that one, or go listen to ‘Stick it Out’ by Frank Zappa. It’s this 10 minute section in particular which highlights the aspect of Andre’s stage performance which elevates him from funny to genuinely ‘big-time’. The material relating to his time spent working as a male escort could easily turn into a confessional series of gross-out tales. Rather than this he mines laughs from every aspect of the stories he’s telling, including some gut-bustingly funny physical work with his microphone which is both nuanced and obscene.

All of his material, his interactions with the audience which border on cockiness but never arrogance, and his observations about the world at large are imbued with a deep sense of compassion, though he never wears this on his sleeve as a badge of honour. I suspect that he may be one of chose charmed individuals who is so naturally funny, charming, and depressingly handsome, that he developed this connection to others as a kind of defence mechanism against accusations, or fears, of perceived aloofness.

All of this marks out our man as ‘star material’, as do the regularity and volume of laughs echoing around the venue, underground vault cum nuclear bunker as it is. Every member of the audience by the end of the show has visibly and audibly found aspects of the material, and Andre, which they can relate to. It’s rare to walk out of a show performed by an artist you haven’t heard of before and know that you’ve watched a nailed on future prime time star. Andre de Freitas however is quantifiably the real deal.

Ewan Law

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The Pear Tree
Aug 16-27 (12:45)

Mundus Vult Decipi

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My lad, Damo Junior, runs the Mumble. As I was coming up to Scotland for my debut stand-up comedy show at that there Edinburgh Fringe, he goes, ‘dad, you’re a comedy expert, why don’t you do some reviews for me.’ Now I don’t really like our Damo, ever since he chang’d his surname from Brogden to Bullen, saying he wanted a more glamourous cognomen – poncey twat! But at the end of the day, even if he might be a complete nobhead, he’s my nobhead & I love ‘im.

My first foray into the world of comedy critique began yesterday when I were flicking thro that there Fringe guide & I saw Lee Kyle, England’s Best Comedian. Now, my mate Jimmy Bruce, & most of the Burnley Miners, think I’m the funniest guy in England, so I went along to check out the competition.

Bloody hell! He was sh!te. Funniest man in England? He’s not even the funniest man in Newcastle. I remember meeting some Geordies in Benidorm last year – they were well funny, especially Mad Mick, but this Lee Kyle is definitely in the wrong job, like. I mean, he thought he was telling jokes, but nobody else in the room did. You could actually hear a fly buzzing about in the awkward silences after his so-call’d punchlines. Nah, bag of sh!te. In fact, I heartily recommend that there Lee Kyle gets some sort of bowel irrigation done on the NHS, cos the amount of shite that came out of his mouth was astonishing – it just kept coming & coming!

Watching Lee Kyle’s dodgy attempt at stand-up reminded me of when I were doing my National Service & got one of them candiru fish stuck down my penile shaft. Fucking painful, & after ten excrutiating minutes with Lee I was wanting the fish! If that’s the standard of the ‘comedians’ in Edinburgh this is gonna be one hard slog, like, reviewing for our lad. But while I’m here, if you wanted to see the real best comedian of England, get yourself down to my show next week; Take My Wives, Strathmore Bar, Aug 20-27 (21:15).

Damo Brogden

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Underbelly, George Square
Aug 16-27 (16:20 )

Respondeat Superior

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Approaching Underbelly at George Square, I asked a flyerer for the show if they could pitch it to me in 30 seconds “Umm, it’s Australian absurdist comedy about insomnia, aaaaand, well I can’t say any more or I’d spoil it”. An hour later, as I was leaving the performance, I thought that they were wise not to try to put together a more detailed description, still feeling discombobulated by the absorbing and discomfiting experience of spending 60 minutes in the mind of a sleepless psycho-drama that would Edgar Allan Poe proud.

As we enter the dark, enclosed, performance space Ange is already trying to get to sleep. Pigtailed in a nightdress, she rolls against the walls at the back of the stage, clutching her pillow tightly, and before too long she begins using the audience as literal ‘props’, their shoulders, laps, and heads all failing to provide an adequately sedative perch to rest her head on and drift away. Which, to be fair, is just as well as over the next hour the sleep deprived performer takes the audience on a captivating fever dream of insomniac consciousness blending pop culture references, multiple re-imaginings of ‘The Exorcist’, and perfectly performed clowning to recreate the existential horror of being trapped by her over-active brain at 2am.

Audience participation continues throughout, with the crowd captivated enough by the absurd vignettes, featuring satanic worms dressed in vegan ‘pleather’, to give themselves to relaxation exercises and pot-luck dips into plastic carrier bags containing the darker contents of Ange’s subconscious. Though on stage this is a solo performance, excellent use of voice clips representing ‘the brain’, and those dark and surreal thoughts which swirl in your head in the wee small hours, ends up turning this into a two-hander. The constant teasing and taunting of repressed thoughts bubbling out every time Ange is on the verge of blissful respite. A third character appears a short while into the show too, the internet. As anyone who’s struggled with insomnia will tell you, YouTube and social media elicit a sirens song to the sleepless, and we are swept up with Ange as she is dragged into corners of the internet which urge on her distracted, almost manic, labyrinthine thought spirals.

The whole show feels very much like a James Joyce novel de-constructed and mashed together with the film ‘Being John Malkovich’, but with an Australian clown and Max Von Sydow replacing John Malkovich. This is all very surreal stuff, and anyone hoping for neatly dovetailing narratives, or simple resolutions may find themselves disappointed. The level of skill displayed in the central performance, the production, and the writing are all of the highest quality you could wish for at The Fringe. The lack of a neatly satisfying ending may frustrate some, and this is not a laugh out loud joke fest, despite being very darkly funny and satisfyingly bizarre throughout.

For those seeking out the leftfield, top grade physical theatre, or simply a deep dive into weirdness, this is very much the show for you. Ange is performing in another show alongside the performer who voices her brain, and I’ll definitely be popping into to spend some more time with the fascinating mind of Ange Lavoipierre.

Ewan Law

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Pleasance Courtyard – Bunker Three
Aug 16-27 (19:15)

Non Omnis Moriar

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NYC based comedian Chloe Radcliffe has built a courageous and thought-provoking show entitled ‘Cheat’ for her Edinburgh debut. Radcliffe has the glow of a natural comic, putting the room at ease and allowing her to explore edgy subjects.

She’s cute and commanding, with charismatic delivery and tremendous wit. She has a large birthmark on her face and makes an endearing subject of it early in the show, showing that she’s used to carving out a tone of authenticity and comfort, preparing the ground for vulnerable sharing.

And vulnerable she gets as she deconstructs, for your curiosity and education, a social taboo – cheating. This time, from the cheater’s perspective, her own. The second half of the show, contrasts the first, as it might begin in the classic New York, ‘public therapy session’ style, but soon becomes something altogether more revealing and generous.

She’s laying bare a side of herself that is rare to see from people and least of all publically. She brings the show to a poignant climax, still maintaining the humour despite an increasingly serious tone. Tears well in her eyes as she reveals that cheating is complex and confusing, leaving the perpetrator carrying much self-doubt and a lot to process.

I spent the next few hours wondering the city contemplating my own experience when I was cheated on out of high school. She shares an anonymous hotline after the show, where you can tweet or text your experiences and she will share them on her socials to generate discussion. She seems to genuinely be wanting to connect and give something more to her audience.

In the end, the show was a defence of romance, not an undermining of it. Radcliffe spoke of being single and wanting another relationship – someone again to “get in the cage with”. It felt like for a brief moment, she was daring to share her cage with us. And that takes a special kind of comic.

Stuart Bruce

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Underbelly Bristo Square
Aug 15-28 (14.25)

Mirabile Visu

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Lane Kwederis has brought a piece of performance art cum comedy which is unique, insightful, provocative, topically political and outstandingly performed and produced to her inaugural Edinburgh Fringe. I’m sure it wont be her last.

A quick run down of the highlights of ‘Sex Job’ includes: Performer shows their queasily hilarious internet ‘kink’ porn – check; Tricks audience member into becoming sex worker – check; Skewers legislative and government hypocrisy – check; Obscene song and dance numbers which are both well performed and funny – check, Septuagenarian audience members making double entendres as they leave at the end – check. This is a show which pretty much has it all, and it’s 5 star rating is easily justified on the basis of the above facts alone.

From the moment Kwederis takes the stage, the audience are tittering away already, they clearly know what they want from this show as the introductory song and dance routine gives hints of the themes to come. Foot fetishes, ‘eating ass’ and MONEYMONEYMONEY. This is x-rated physical theatre doubling as a satire on consumerist/capitalist ideology, and over the course of the hour the two themes are finely balanced. Lane specialises in ‘Findom’, a kink in which women financially dominate men for their sexual gratification. To her credit Kwederis paints her customers in a considerate and inclusive light, and for our educational benefit we are lead through a ‘class’ in which she elucidates on some of the more curious kinks she’s been asked to indulge her customers in, including ‘SPH’ (Small penis humiliation) ‘CFNM’ (Clothed female, naked male), and a disturbing variety of urine based ‘get offs’. To think I once considered that I was broad minded.

The recurring themes of money, power and control, and what those who have all of the above require to keep themselves ‘satisfied’, neatly intertwine throughout all sections of the show. The audience participation sections convey all of this topical theory into well realised and illuminating social experiments, which, as with every other section of the show including several song and dance numbers, mini-game shows, and the above mentioned ‘kink-education class’.

Lane has a background, and degree, in theatre & improv, and this shows in the manner which she grips the audience from the beginning of the the show and has us all on tenterhooks as she describes the pitfalls of working within a sector which is more vulnerable to abuse from politicians and multi-national corporations than it is from the ‘punters’ themselves. Voice clips, video clips and sound effects are all utilised in a manner which adds to the show, rather than distract.

I hadn’t known quite what to expect when Sex Job popped up on my review list. I certainly didn’t anticipate that it would shoot straight into my top 5 must see shows of the year. Catch her while she’s still relatively unknown, with charm, talent, pinpoint comedic timing and top level audience work Lane Kederis may not be working her ‘Sex Job’ for much longer.

Ewan Law

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Just The Tonic at the Caves
Aug 15-27 (18.20)

Mortui Non Mordent

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‘As Seen on CCTV’ sees Matt Price storytelling about a moment of clarity experienced whilst speaking to a ‘Life Therapist’. Life Therapists, as we are informed, make their living reframing the negative in life into the positive. Whilst watching, I had my own moment of clarity. This hour of warmly and energetically delivered colloquial jokes, fine tuned impressions, and barely suppressed frenetic energy is ‘anti-life coaching’, a light look at those individuals and situations which somehow manage to turn positive into negative, which may well be a product of Matt’s particularly irritating life therapist who is anti-stand up, pro-theft, and is more intent on selling Matt ‘whale song’ CD’s than his own goals and aspirations.

Our host introduces himself, and his intense stage presence, by announcing that a member of the audience has bought him a pint before the gig. By the end of the show he’s openly proclaiming that he wished it had been of vodka, rather than lager. The audience laugh in disagreement, as the improvised responses to heckling and the near constant riffing with the crowd are stand out highlights. He describes himself as a ‘people person’, which is just as well given a stage persona which occasionally borders on aggressive. This is not an issue, as the majority of the real-life characters he brings onto stage throughout the show are all of a similarly aggro ilk.

Cockney gangsters, Glaswegians (redundantly) characterised as unerringly psychopathic, and Cornwallian yokels all get their chance to rage against the machine, putting Matt’s own initial frenetic energy firmly into context. All of this colloquial material is well observed with matching facial punctuation and very funny. This is unsurprising given that he’s from Cornwall himself, his wife is Glaswegian, and he interviews criminals for a living. The skills he’s picked up in that unusual vocation are put to excellent use throughout the show while dealing with the increasingly tipsy, and talkative, punter who bought him a pint before the gig, and some of the biggest belly laughs from the audience result from his excellent riffing with the crowd during which he is, counterintuitively, at his most calm even if he does discharge our heckler to the bar before asking the crowd if they’d be willing to take part in a ‘Strangers on a Train’ style intervention involving cling-film and a lamppost.

Other highlights include anti-Devon rants, Death Metal impersonations, and an excellent anecdote about watching the performance of a cover version of ‘You Suffer’ by Napalm Death. Call backs throughout the set to the record breaking feats of Annabelle Chung are not received as well, and sandwiched between Matt’s neat character work and observational skills they stick out somewhat. Despite this it’s a solid hour of laughs with a charming performer, and an amusing insight into niche regional perspectives which are comfortingly similar wherever in the provinces Matt takes us.

Ewan Law