Fringe Review - Andrew Lawrence: Don't Just Do Something, Sit There, Pleasance Upstairs, 24/08/2008

When life gives you lemons, they say, make lemonade. When life gives you bright orange hair, the face of a troll, the voice of a chimp on helium and the body of the bloke off the Mr Muscle adverts, be a comedian.

Andrew Lawrence, it has to be said, has made great play of his appearance in the past and continues to do so. However, he does seem to also be trying to tone down that aspect of his act. The wild haired bug eyed loon of two years ago is gone, as is last year's uncomfortable looking scrawny youth looking like he was dressed by his mum. Instead, his hair cut fashionably short and wearing a well fitting sports jacket, he's the kind of guy you would hardly take a second glance at in the street.

And in some ways that should be a good thing, as it takes the focus away from the visual and towards the verbal, which has always been his forte. Except that this year, that seems slightly subdued also. His ability to paint horrendous mental pictures using evil twisted words has always been his forte, but this year he seems to have lost some of that amazing verbal dexterity in favour of just being a bit shouty.

What is good is that, despite road testing this show all over the country, he has clearly found the time since arriving to write a whole new section just for Edinburgh which, by its nature he will have to discard upon leaving, concerning the ubiquity of his face on the side of taxi cabs. He had thought everyone would be doing the same, he says, but finding it was just him, he now feels like the only person to turn up to a party in fancy dress.

The theme of the show, and the point of the title, is the sheer uselessness of ambition, the pointlessness of being a driven individual, striving to climb life's ziggurat, to improve ones self, to reach the pinnacle of success, when we're all just going to die in the end anyway. And to illustrate this, his example is, as always, himself, and his pathetic, miserable existance as a man who makes his living standing up for an hour each night trying amuse people, and half the time failing to do so.

The old Lawrence is still there, under the surface, that much is clear. He is still full of misanthropic disdain of the world at large, and a savage loathing of both himself and society in general, but some of the almost poetic nature of his previous diatribes is gone, replaced by more generalised speech, which might make for a more popular and easily accessible show, but for me takes away a certain portion of his uniqueness. We already have plenty of "grumpy old men" comedians, we don't need a grumpy young one, and my worry is that if Lawrence continues down this path he will join the morass of homogenised complainers we already have on the comedy circuit, rather than being the "one of a kind" talent he has been in the past.

Fringe Review - Tim Fitzhigham: The Bard's Fool, Pleasance Hut, 22/08/2008

Britain is not a world leader in very much any more, but the one thing we produce more and better of than anyone else is eccentrics. Sir Tim Fitzhigham, knighted by a deposed West Indian monarchy and holding the rank of Commodore in the Royal Navy as commander of the docks of a landlocked town, who has navigated the Thames in a paper boat, rowed across the English Channel in a bathtub, and lived as a medieval knight in a cave in Spain, qualifies for this title admirably.

Fitzhigham's problem, it seems, is that he reads too much. And that this reading leads him to thinking, and that's what gets him into trouble. Each of his previous adventures have come from "I wonder if I could do that" moments after reading some historical feat, and this year has been no different, after reading the poem Nine Daies Wonder by Will Kemp, the leading clown of Elizabethan England who, on being told by Shakespeare that there would be no role for him in the play Hamlet, as there would be no comedy in it, decided to teach the Bard a lesson in comedy by Morris Dancing from London to Norwich.

There were a number of problems facing Sir Tim in recreating this feat, however. And pretty much all of them could be summed up using the two words, "Morris Dancing." But problems are the stuff of comedy, without them there would barely be a show, so more power to the problems. Fitzhigham leads us through his preparation and his journey in increasingly frantic and frenetic style, whilst under the protection of his own flag, which as a Commodore he is entitled to fly giving him full jurisdiction over the surrounding area.

It's a scrappy show, to be honest, but that is part of Fitzhigham's charm, the fact that, whilst most likely every last word has been worked out in advance, he gives the impression that he is merely bumbling through whilst making everything up on the spot. And the fact is that he is such a likeable fellow that you can't help but be charmed by him and caught up in proceedings, even during a section of the show that skates perilously close to being in extremely bad taste.

In one portion of the show he makes fun of Brendon Burns' triumph in last years if.comedy awards, but the humour is in the fact that he must be aware himself that such accolades are almost certainly never going to be troubling his door. But it's an entertaining hour nonetheless, and a decent enough way to spend the early part of a rainy Edinburgh evening.

Fringe Review - Mark Watson: All The Thoughts I've Had Since I Was Born, Pleasance Grand, 21/08/2008

The habit Mark Watson has of starting his shows from within the audience can be an effective trick. Except on a night when the Pleasance Box Office computer systems have failed, and queues are stretching round the block for the ticket collection windows where harrassed students write tickets out by hand and he's been told to hold the start until they can get everybody processed. When it means being trapped in amongst an increasingly fractious group of people who already had their tickets and arrived on time, while the remainder of the audience trickle in by ones and twos.

But if Watson was stressed by the situation, it's difficult to tell, being that he is a barely contained bundle of nervous energy at the best of times. But we must hope not, considering that being stressed, and how it led to him being rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack shortly after last year's festival, was the main subject of the show. But if stress there was, it couldn't have been helped by the eventual start of the show and the discovery of a fourteen year-old girl in the audience leading to the even more horrified discovery of an eight year-old one.

Who exactly would take an eight year-old to a clearly grown-up comedy show was clearly beyond the grasp of pretty much everyone, but Watson took the fact in his stride, despite his announcement of it as a personal record, constantly referring back and gleefully pushing the boundaries of filth while checking in with the confused child.

The show itself, then, details his efforts to de-stress his life, and taking into account that his job, standing in front of people talking shit for an hour a day, cannot possibly be as stressful as deciding how long to send people to prison for, he looks at the rest of his life for the answer. This, really, is just an excuse to delve into whatever areas his quirky sense of humour has led him to, from a horrendous night in a travelodge, to a schadenfreude-fuelled event on a train station platform, via a spot of J.K.Rowling envy along the way.

It is Watson's talent to take these seemingly minor events and spin them into trauma-filled tales of epic proportions, all the while jittering in his nervy persona while still having the confidence to keep checking with the audience as to how it's all going, safe in the knowledge that the answer will be "good." Watson's rise to the stature of comic who can sell out this huge venue has been rapid, and on this evidence it shows no sign of stopping.

Fringe Review - Lucy Porter: The Bare Necessities, Pleasance One, 19/08/2008

The unique selling point of Lucy Porter has always been her cute, bubbly, sweet demeanour allied to a vicious tongue and a filthy mind. This year she has overloaded on the cute, performing her show in front of a backdrop featuring a kitten and two ducklings. It provides her with a nice sight gag, but sadly it may also be symptomatic of something else.

Porter's humour has always relied heavily on her disastrous love life, but this year she is happily settled and in a relationship, and this seems to have spilled over into her humour, because there is just something lacking here. Her biting wit seems to be just that little bit lacking in bite for once, almost as if, having reached the level where she can sell out the three and four hundred seater venues, she's settled back and decided to coast for a while.

Not that this show is bad, exactly. It is an entertaining hour, and Porter is still capable of delivering a few absolute killer punchlines during its course. And her theme could not be more timely in this year of belt tightening, as she tackles the subject of identifying the things that are essential to us in life for our own happiness and wellbeing, and divesting ourselves of all the extraneous frivolities.

But it all seems a little flat. The laughs are there, but they are fewer and further between and separated by an awful lot of filler. If this were your first experience of Porter you might find yourself wondering why so many had come to pack out the room. It's a decent enough show, but pales by comparison with some of her previous triumphs.

Still, Lucy may be diminuitive of stature, but she is fiesty of nature, and I'm sure this is just a minor blip in what is an otherwise excellent CV and that next year she will bounce back with the kind of quality we have come to expect.

Fringe Review - Rhod Gilbert and the Award Winning Mince Pie, Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 10/08/2008

For his fourth full length Edinburgh show, it is clear from the venue that Rhod Gilbert is moving swiftly up the comedy ladder towards "star attraction" status. It is also clear that it is taking it's toll on him physically, as his always throaty voice is now so raspy it sounds like someone has taken a power sander to it.

And the pace with which this show moves can't help. Those who have experienced Gilbert's brand of "not comedy but misery" will know to expect a slowly building tale in which disaster and disappointment pile on each other with ever increasing frequency until it arrives at a cataclysmic conclusion.

The premise, this year, is that Gilbert has been persuaded by others to move his comedy into the real world, and leave behind the fictional Welsh town of Llanbobl where his previous shows have been set. Doing so, however, has led him inexorably towards a fateful encounter with the staff of an almost deserted Knutsford service station on the M6 at two thirty one morning, where he finds himself buying myriads of useless tat, hoping to catch some form of entertainment show in the toilets, and having a mental breakdown over the titular award-winning mince pie which is the last item left in the cafeteria.

In his incandescent rage at these seemingly minor irritations, Gilbert raises the mundane to the level of Greek tragedy, providing his audience with the catharsis he fails to attain for himself. The pace is relentless, but occasional respite is given to the audience through various sidetracks in which he discusses his relationship with a much younger woman, a trip to Afghanistan to entertain the troops, and an explanation of the difference between "ballroom" and "cabaret" style venue layouts in Ebbw Vale.

It's all wildly entertaining stuff, and when he finally collapses in exhaustion into his service-station bought canvas directors chair to deliver his conclusion, the audience feel like collapsing alongside him. It's been a wild ride and we can feel his fatigue as if it were our own.

Gilbert grows in stature year on year, and could be the perfect Edinburgh Fringe comedian. Where other comics often find difficulty in sustaining an hour long show, he thrives on it, using the time to build the various strands of his tale until it finally explodes into a climax of callbacks. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next year.

Fringe Review - Tom Wrigglesworth: I'm Struggling To See How That's Helping, Pleasance Below, 03/08/2008

Hardly a household name, despite having won So You Think You're Funny five years ago, Tom Wrigglesworth is a lanky Yorkshireman with wildly unlikely hair who adopts the always popular style of the slightly befuddled Englishman nonplussed by the world around him.

Wrigglesworth greets his audience from the stage, already there seated on a stool, noodling away on a guitar while making wryly sardonic comments about those coming in. On this particular day he seems to have an obsession with umbrellas, having spotted a large and burly man carrying a particularly effeminate-looking example of said article, and this acts as a good way to get the audience warmed up and ready for comedy by the time they are in their seats.

The broad theme of the show, as can probably be surmised from the title, is the little things in life which seem designed to baffle us. But Wrigglesworth himself admits very early on that this is merely a device to allow him to paint on a wide-ranging canvas by being deliberately vague about the actual focus. It is admissions of this kind that help him to make the show seem like an inclusive experience, a kind of "we're all in this together" attitude which you can't help finding yourself warming to.

Many of his themes during the show are broad, a number of them are the usual popular targets, and he includes a routine on Facebook which seems to be becoming this year's ever-present topic, and while nothing he does is exactly ground-breaking most of his routines are funny, find original things to say, and hit their mark.

Meanwhile his audience banter is very good, and he finds particular fun in having a French girl in the front row whose boyfriend frequently has to explain points of reference to her.

Overall this is one of those shows that you often come across in the Fringe, that are not going to be troubling any of the awards panels, but nonetheless prove a highly enjoyable way of whiling away an hour and send you back onto the street with a broad smile on your face.

Fringe Review - Tim Minchin: Ready For This?, Pleasance Grand, 01/08/2008

The title of Perrier Best Newcomer is not always a guarantee of great things to come. One or two of the recipients have gone on to great things, but some have fallen by the wayside and most simply went on to be jobbing comedians. Few, surely, have ended up, just three years later, filling one of the largest regular venues on the Fringe.

Such is Tim Minchin’s talent that it is hard to believe that it can only have been three years. But so meteoric has been his rise that, with this, his third Fringe show, with a documentary film about his life already under his belt, this is beyond doubt one of the hot tickets of the year.

Which is a lot of pressure to put on someone so, relatively speaking, inexperienced. And as a musical comedian, it must be equally difficult to leave behind songs that have served him long and well, especially with loyal fans who would have been just as happy with another outing of Inflatable You and Canvas Bag.

But this is an all new show. Nothing borrowed from earlier shows, nothing recycled. And once again, Minchin has come up trumps with a set of songs which range from the silly and fun to the complex and thought-provoking. If there is a disappointment in the show it is maybe that the opening “Ready For This” song is a little too reminiscent of the previous “So Rock” from his last show, with a similar “pretend instrument” theme to it.

But that’s just a niggle, a minor blip in another all-round triumph which can only enhance Minchin’s reputation. It’s a show in which he appears to be airing a few general grievances, working through some of the things that bug him in life, whether it be religious fundementalists trying to tell him how to be a good person, new age hippie idealism and the rejection of science, or just intolerance that he is subjected to on a more, shall we say, hirsute level.

Minchin is really a comic who entertains on every level. His show combines superb physical comedy and slapstic with amazing verbal dexterity and virtuoso musicianship, and even some risk taking as there are few who would have the guts to hand over nine whole minutes of their hour long show to a beat poem which is, in essence, just a single extended joke.

But it works, and does so superbly, blending with all the other elements to create what would, if I were the kind of reviewer to give out stars, be the first this year to receive all five of them. Minchin is unmissable, and long may he remain so. It will take something special if I am going to see another show this year as good as this one.

Fringe Preview - Reginald D Hunter: No Country for Grown Men, Pleasance Grand, 30/07/2008

Is Reg Hunter mellowing in his old age? After courting controversy with show titles such as "Pride and Prejudice and Niggas" and "A Mystery Wrapped in a Nigga", and last year responding to the furore with a show called "Fuck You in an Age of Consequence," this year's strapline seems positively tame. It does, however, succinctly sum up the idea that Reg is trying to put across.

The theme of the show is the way in which, in modern life, we are not trusted to be grown-ups, even in a matter such as choosing what to do when you find there is no paper in the pub toilet. His beef is that men are not being allowed to act like men any more, but this isn't a macho thing, just a question of disposing of the "rules" and letting us get back to using our basic common sense.

Hunter has some great routines and a few killer lines in here, but this being a preview show, it has to be said that it was yet to really gel into a coherent whole. There were a few points where it was clear that he was struggling to remember what he had planned to talk about next, and one or two of the topics seemed a little random and scattered.

But that's what previews are for, and it was equally clear that there was enough good stuff in here that, once he's up and firing on all cylinders, it will live up to the quality we have come to expect.

And of course Hunter always has the main weapon in his arsenal, that deep-voiced warm soothing southern drawl that you could listen to all day. Combined with the baffled grin with which he punctuates his most salient points, it makes him an extraordinarily charismatic performer, which gives him the freedom to draw the audience to him rather than reaching for laughs and punchlines.

As more of an initial overview than a finished product, it is difficult to say, but I'm not sure this show is ever going to reach the heights of some of his previous outings, but nonetheless it maintains a very high standard, and in its late night slot could make an excellent end to a packed Fringe day.

Mark Olver, Lloyd Langford - Pleasance Cabaret Bar, Edinburgh, 12/02/2008

There are times, standing in front of a packed room when you are taking the audience with you every step of the way, when comedy must surely be one of the best jobs in the world. But there are other times when it must be bloody hard work. Trying to entertain twenty-nine people (I counted) in a room that can hold nearly two hundred would be one of those times.

I couldn’t say for sure why this gig was so poorly attended. It was organised by the Edinburgh University student’s union, but open to outsiders if they knew it was on. That was probably part of the reason, though, because it doesn’t seem to have been advertised outside the university campus at all. I only found it by accident, and on arriving found a poster showing it was somewhere in the middle of a whole series of Tuesday night gigs, many of the earlier ones of which I would have gone to if I had known they were on.

But why more students didn’t attend, I don’t know. It’s a shame, because both of these comics deserved a better audience. They both worked hard, with mixed results, to win over the meagre group that had made the effort to come and see them. And having both travelled a long distance for a couple of midweek shows, they will both probably think long and hard before accepting a similar booking in the future.

Lloyd Langford was affected worst by the lack of attendance. A young Welshman in his early twenties, he’s clearly a talented lad and probably has a decent future ahead of him in the stand-up game. But he doesn’t yet have the experience and stagecraft to be able to cope with a night like this one, and there were times he was very visibly floundering. His performance was very stop-start, and he seemed unable to build up any momentum, and often it seemed more like a free-for-all down the pub chat with a large group of people rather than a comedy show. But for all that, I would like to see him on a proper club night some time, because I think with a decent audience in front of him he has the potential to be very funny indeed.

Mark Olver, on the other hand, while not exactly a “star name” on the circuit, can at least be described as a seasoned pro. His day job, as warm-up man for Deal or No Deal, has taught him how to handle any kind of audience, and he quite quickly adapted his set to the environment rather than trying to force things.

He started the show by making me, personally, feel guilty. This was not his fault, I hasten to add, and he couldn’t have known. But having ascertained that I was not a student, he asked if I had come specifically to see him. I had, as it happened, as it had been recognising his name on the internet listing that made me say, hey, let’s go along. However, he had a show on in the Fringe last year, and I hadn’t gone to that because I had been put off by the rather simpering expression he was wearing on the poster. So when he replied that he was pleased, because hardly anyone ever came specifically to see him, and then explained that it was because of the posters, and because “they have this face on them,” it was a little close to the bone.

This led into a routine about how few people came to see his Fringe show, and how he had given away chocolate biscuits to the audience in the hope that people would tell their friends and it might encourage them to come. “One show I had one of those king size rolls of jaffa cakes,” he said. “It was over-optimistic. A packet of club was more than sufficient.”

This set was also extremely informal, but it was born of experience rather than desperation. His warm-up gig has clearly taught him how to feed off the audience, and he made it feel as if he was confiding his secrets in a small group of close friends rather than playing a show, which worked very well in the circumstances. Furthermore, while many solo Fringe show comics are currently milking the last drops from last year’s shows, Olver is clearly already in the transitional stage, working on new material for the coming year, which led to him frequently referring to a notebook of ideas and asking people what they thought he should do, again working with rather than against the small numbers in the room.

A large part of the set consisted of confiding his ideas for this year’s Fringe show, and if nothing else he has probably ensured that many of those in the room, myself included, will surely attend to see how it worked out. Overall, I came away wishing I had made the effort to see him before. Olver is probably never going to hit the big time, or be anything more than a working comic, but he is highly professional, experienced, and most importantly, he makes you laugh. And what else are you going to be doing on a Tuesday night?