Rob Auton, Assembly Roxy ★★★★
The stage is littered with 30-odd large white cards bearing words such as “love”, “believe” and “push”. Rob Auton comes on stage and tells us he’s CAN, a former motivational speaker, and in the following 60 minutes of CAN (An Hour-Long Story) we hear his tale.
Monstering the Rocketman by Henry Naylor, Pleasance Dome ★★★★
Alison Spittle, Monkey Barrel ★★★
Alison Spittle is fat, she tells us at the top of the show. But not as fat as she used to be. And that’s the premise of BIG, in which she describes why she has been overweight since she was eight years old and what led to the recent weight loss – “about an XL Bully’s-worth”.
There aren’t many comics like Eddie Pepitone any more – the veteran comic’s shtick harks to back an earlier age, pre-suitable for TV and Netflix specials. As the New Yorker says drily in his latest special, The Collapse, he was never going to be considered as a host of either a reality programme full of beautiful people or a smarmy late-night chat show.
Appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe has long been an expensive gig for comics. But while stand-ups may need only a microphone to ply their wares at the world’s biggest arts festival, the costs they have to bear – among them venue charges, accommodation and marketing – don’t come cheap, and are growing year on year. Many people attending the Fringe are unaware of its financial eco-system – but the majority of performers there are self-funding.
Kieran Hodgson is known to television viewers from Two Doors Down and to online fans for his spoofs of TV dramas; but comedy fans know him best for his high-concept stand-up shows, which draw heavily on his personal life.
And so Voice of America, his latest live offering, follows in the same vein, charting as it does his lifelong love affair with America, formed years before he actually set foot in the 50 states.
Death can be a powerful driver for comedy, as countless stand-ups and sitcom writers will affirm, but it has to be sensitively handled. Dark humour can be, forgive the pun, life-affirming, and an excuse for the tears, whether of pain or pleasure, to flow.
Dara Ó Briain’s has described his previous show So… Where Were We? – in which he describes his search for his birth mother who gave him up for adoption when he was a baby – as his Philomena, while his latest, Re: Creation, is his version of Elf, in which a grown man travels across the world to find his birth father.
Nick Mohammed invented his Mr Swallow character – camp, lisping, with an inflated ego and the mistaken belief that he has creative talent – more than a decade ago, but he reached a new audience with his appearance as the good guy-goes-bad-then-good-again Nate in the lovely television comedy Ted Lasso.
