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Monkey Barrel 4
Aug 22-27 (19:50)

Non Est Vivere Sed Valera Vita Est

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If you’re going to a Sikisa show, prepare to be rocked. She’s got a majestic presence and owns the space. Referencing her South London roots and smoothly rolling through a string of colourful stories, she paints a rich picture of living life to the fullest and taking no prisioners.

She introduces herself as a comedian and burlesque performer but THIS IS NOT A BURLESQUE SHOW so don’t expect any burlesque – you haven’t paid enough. Still, she undresses metaphorically and gets the crowd giggling uncontrollably as she takes us through entertaning anecdotes of awkward encounters and bad dates.

I grew up on the other side of the planet but I felt like I was at a London house party and she’s showing me around. She’s the big sister everyone wishes they had and makes everyone feel comfortable. She’s at home being both outrageous and insightful and positively sparkles with her passion to perform that drives the show.

She struck a close rapport with the crowd and her comedy would better resonate with London folk given the inside references. The hour started to drag but she knows how to bring it home. I wanted more humour from the first half but was thankful that she knows how to build to the climax. Remember though, this is not a burlesque show and you will not see any burlesque! Got it?😉

Stuart Bruce

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Frankenstein Pub
Aug 22-28 (12:00)

In Omnia Paratus

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It is clear that Helen Prior is a lover of life, a vigorous explorer of all it has to offer, including her recent entry into the world of comedy performance. Not your classic comedian by any means, Helen is an educator at heart, & after an hour with her sophisticated confessional comedy at this year’s Fringe, one can only feel both entertain’d & culturally enrich’d. For example when she show’d me Putin’s ancesteor in a Van Eyck 1422 AD painting was well cool, like, I’ve already put it up on facebook.

Her show is call’d Sex, Art and the Art of Survival, & is a blend of biocom & art history talk, complete with well-pixelated images of the paintings she discusses. Dali is there, Gainsborough is there, & there’s also loads of stuff I’ve never seen or heard off before – its a visual & fibre-filling treat really.

On top of this noble platform, Helen also possesses spoonfuls of rampant sexual energy, & at the heart of her show we are treated to a lengthy pictorial series of vaginas & penises. She must have used the word cun! about 10 times in a minute or two – in the UK normally someone would say it once, then look around briefly & awkwardly to which social division each person has gravitated towards following the bringing of the profane elephant into the room, before realising they might actually have to apologise. Not Helen, tho’ she’s more than happy to use the word, & why the hell not?

As a spectator I thought the start was a little off, perhaps showtime nerves, or perhaps it was my brain getting a grasp on her Russian accent. She’s a very eloquent lady, but it took me a while to feel her true resonance – like when I finally understood Rabbie Burns, once I’d penetrated his lowland Scots, was in fact an absolute genius. But come the middle of Sex, Art and the Art of Survival, I was really flowing along with the show, right before it took a somewhat darker turn when Helen found herself battling ovarian cancer.

But, & blessingly, she won, & here she is now in Edinburgh, sharing her story & winning our hearts. After the performance, Helen talk’d about cancer with some of her departing audience, a really nice touch, & I can see how Helen’s victory over the disease will be inspirational to others.

Helen is a great presence & an entertaining watch to boot – pure Fringe cocktail, chaperoning many interesting ingredients into her performance art. Full of erections & ressurection, altho’ Sex, Art and the Art of Survival is not the funniest – yet – comedy show around this year, it is certainly the most cultural one I’ve seen, & for that I applaud you Helen. After only one year with Thalia, you’re off to a great start,

Damo

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Gilded Ballon Teviot Lounge
Aug 19-27 (15:00)

Catigat Ridendo Mores

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Gabby Killick is a straight talking lass and even Conversations with her Agent didn’t seem to change her mindset. Never fazed, never listening, Gabby bulldozes her way through 1 hour of stand up comedy sketches with her agent habitually breathing down her neck.

Gabby Killick is a cheery, delightful happy individual that exudes energy like a beetle exuding a caustic liquid. Bursting out her racing blocks like an athlete sprinter, Gabby grabs the audience’s attention within seconds of taking to the stage. Like an interceptor jet she is firing questions at her unsuspecting guests and delving into their lives with one only one goal in mind… fun. Hers is a simple philosophy – the more energy you give me the more fun I give you.

Gabby is more than just a stand-up comedian. Lending her skills and talent to singing, rapping and acting, as was proved in her hit comedy show “Girlfriend from Hell”, Gabby injects into the room a massive sense of truth. Like the venom from a tree pit viper, she is ready to strike with her “Lick it Clean” jokes without remorse. She maybe Scabby Gabby to some but in reality she is a trail blazer.

Subject matter is the basis of any good comedy gig and Gabby has no shortage of material. Keeping the attention of one human being can be hard enough, so a cluster of strangers must be a challenge, but not for Gabby! Make them family, take them under your wing and when they least suspect it, unleash a tornado of mind-blowing and thought provoking gags that smash through the audience like a crash test dummy’s first day at the office. The diversity in Conversations with my Agent is genius. Crisscrossing characters is no easy feat, but Gabby does it brilliantly. The facial expressions, the shape shifting between Larry (her agent) and Gabby is hilarious and holds the show together well. The obsessive elements of our lives are visible at every turn, and Gabby is clear to point them out. Phone Apps, Social Media, Abortion, Body Waxing, Relationships, Sex ( with connections to PlayStation), Drinking, Money, (in particular Golddiggers). Stand-Up comedy should be edgy, irritable with sprinkles of tension, and Gabby delivers this on all fronts.

If we lose the ability of truth in comedy then comedy is not comedy anymore. Gabby Killick – Conversations with my Agent is a direct hard hitting show that takes no prisoners. Factual and honest, and combined with songs and raps that included Covid and Diseases, no stone was left unturned in her attempt to inflict laughter on her audience. Courageous and entertaining Gabby has created a comedy sketch show that breaths life back into a very tender comedy circuit. Like a comet hurling through space and time this show will impact on you like no other at this year’s Edinburgh Frine Festival.

Raymond Speedie

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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