Fringe comedy reviews: Elf Lyons Is The Woman on the Edge | Brendan Scannell: The Abyss + more

Elf Lyons Is The Woman on the Edge | Richard Lakos

Elf Lyons Is The Woman on the Edge ★★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 31 August

The famous joke about Pagliacci the clown is threaded through this extraordinarily beautiful theatrical show by Elf Lyons. Styled as an icy Hitchcock heroine, with a gorgeous shimmering dress that seems destined to slip away from her body, Elf stalks the stage on tip toe, as if she is wearing vertiginous heels.

In front of a triptych of mirrors, she is a vision of loveliness. But like all Hitchcock heroines she is terrified, vulnerable and alone. Her voice is a weird strangled mash up of Katherine Hepburn and Fenella Fielding. She’s a Hollywood heroine, but she’s also a clown. So her melancholy is played with surreal aplomb. Elf’s incredible collapsing dress is also a smoke machine. Her telephone is also a banana.

Precise physical comedy and overblown absurd monologues combine to make this a very funny but strangely unsettling spectacle. There are the repeated references to the Apollo 13 space mission and bouncy castles. And Elf Lyons keeps returning to Pagliacci, the hilarious clown who went to the psychiatrist and revealed he was unbearably sad.

Gradually fragments of Elf Lyons’ emotional and romantic life begin to emerge in real-life recordings gathered from those close to her. There has been something our broken heroine has been trying to tell us all along.

Lyons lip syncs her way through her own recent past. And we understand how the woman and the artist on the stage, whose previous, very successful Fringe show saw her pretending to be a horse, has become broken.

Like the Hitchcock heroines and like Pagliacci, she’s been holding it all together while secretly falling apart. But unlike the Hitchcock heroines she’s a clown and that gives her a way to fight back.

Elf decides to make an opera out of her relationship disasters with a libretto drawn from real life, and which bashes all the bad boyfriends into one. It’s the story of a woman reclaiming her voice, whether anyone thinks she’s a singer or not.

We finally find out why the Apollo 13 Space mission means so much to her and why there has been so much mention of bouncy castles.

Elf’s finale is a triumph, as she reclaims her destiny and leaves the audience with an unforgettable image of healing and recovery which brings her story to a close and brings everyone in the room to their feet. Claire Smith

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Brendan Scannell: The Abyss ★★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 24) until 30 August

There's a rich tradition of therapy by way of stand-up and Emmy-nominated actor Brendan Scannell combines the two in this deeply personal and meticulously performed hour that blurs the line between comedy and confessional.

The titular abyss is the one into which Scannell is pulled due to the psychosis of his brother, a trans man with schizophrenia who he watches being "replaced by something terrible” with little help from the broken American health care system. It’s a tragic and heartfelt story told beautifully by a family member wrestling to cope with the inevitable impact on his own life.

Of course tragedy and comedy make great bedfellows and, amidst this melancholic take on mental illness, the laughs are provided by frequent leaps into more wide-ranging standup covering his childhood, life in LA and the well-worn path through medication and addiction to self-help and rehab. The latter is described as a "three month open mike" which you’d bet also doubled as a writing workshop for the show itself.

Attempting to bring the two halves together are frequent visits to a course of 'submersible oxygen therapy', complete with diver's helmet, taking Scannell ever deeper into his own psyche – a sharp skewering of the kind of woo-woo beloved of the performer's fellow Los Angelenos.

It's frustrating that Scannell feels the need for so much window dressing when the sections about his brother are so well-drawn and gripping. He says he enjoys “mining his life for laughs” but, in a story that ends with him wrestling over how to “grieve somebody who is still alive”, there's the feeling that some tales really don’t need so many theatrical or comic distractions.

That said, the final ten minutes bring everything together to a tear-stained and complex close that’s tremendously moving without ever threatening to be mawkish. David Hepburn

Rosalie Minnitt: Clementine 2 ★★★

Beside at Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

There’s a bit of confusion at the start of Clementine 2. Half the audience think they are coming to see a Jane Austen spoof, then Rosalie Minett bounces onto the stage in an Adidas bodice and announces she cannot read.

Minnitt has made an error believing she can create a sequel to last year’s show without fully explaining to anyone what last year’s show was about. In fact, Clementine isn’t really a spoof of anything. It’s a historical comedy with no facts and no basis in reality. Once the audience gets the hang of it, it’s rather fun.

Clementine gets caught up in a revolution. She argues with her best friend. She goes to the theatre and discovers the show is all about her. There’s some enjoyably bonkers crowd-work, some puppets raided from a nursery toy box and even a bit of crowd surfing.

The show comes into its own when it starts to go wrong. A prop malfunction forces Minnitt to improvise and her show is the better for it. Her scripted material relies too much on niche references, swear words and not very convincing regional accents. The looser bits suggest there’s a clown here struggling to get out. Claire Smith

Lizzie Sunshine ★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 31 August

Nothing less than a one-woman variety show, Lizzie Sunshine (the alter ego of performer Liz Coin) leaves no stone unturned in her bid to provide an hour of relentlessly upbeat entertainment with a sting in its tail.

The set-up is that the other half of Lizzie’s double act is running late so she soldiers on alone, with plenty of laughs coming from her partner’s absence.

It feels weirdly like a children’s show at first, before coalescing into a messy and hyperactive pantomime for musical theatre-loving adults. There’s clowning, improv, singalongs, plenty of good-natured audience interaction and pretty much anything else she can think to throw at it.

She’s a talented and magnetic performer but some sections work far better than others, the nadir being a baffling detour to a Greek Orthodox church service. Meanwhile, it constantly threatens to descend into the kind of meaningless self-help it’s seeking to skewer.

The introspective moments are mainly restricted to backstage self-doubt – the only real indication of the darkness to come. When it arrives the tonal shift is a hairpin bend that feels forced, no matter how sincere the intention.

It’s still great fun (and not just because it’s literally seen through rose-tinted glasses), but there’s only so far a positive outlook can take you. David Hepburn

READ MORE: My Festival: Mariella Frostrup

Davina Bentley: Dancing While Old ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

When Davina Bentley's long-term boyfriend dumped her, she suddenly realised that she'd completely subsumed her identity within their relationship. Quitting her city law firm job, the privileged comic then further strained ties with her judgemental mother and condescending sister by taking up comedy.

Now 42 and back on the dating scene, Bentley doesn't pretend to have the answers to her moorlessness. And the strength of her consistently funny debut is that it doesn't shrink from being a poor little rich girl's lament.

With blithe matter-of-factness, she elevates the questions of whether to have cosmetic enhancements or threesomes to matters of the highest import, even as her experience of the latter leaves her wondering if it's the trendy, female empowerment it promised.

For her mature rejuvenation, she takes dubious inspiration from Henry VIII, who only became the portly, wife dispatcher of renown a few decades in. This historical interest prompts some pithy lines but also a few games with the audience that feel suspiciously like filler.

Her material is most appealing when she's slipping between cultures and generations, sharp and satirical about the younger women she both seeks to emulate and acts as a tutting matriarch to, echoing the prim protestations of her mother. Jay Richardson

Ifrah Qureshi: 48 Flaws of Power ★★★

The Stand Comedy Club 3 & 4 (Venue 12) until 30 August

Lightly hung on Robert Greene's self-help bestseller The 48 Laws of Power, this is an assured and entertaining first Fringe hour from Edinburgh native Ifrah Qureshi.

Now based in Glasgow and sharing a home with her mother, the comic is fighting a defensive rearguard action against maternal disapproval. As the maligned middle child, her job in IT really doesn't cut it when set against her sisters being doctors.

Yet guided by Greene's lessons, and having grown up as the closest thing to a man in her all-female household, she generally projects high-status confidence that she is prevailing in her domestic conflict and, indeed, all of the power struggles that she now perceives.

Coming from a conservative, Muslim, Pakistani background gives her plenty to kick against. As does racial prejudice, and she responds to the insidious question of “where do you come from?” with an exquisite, feminist rejoinder.

Moving smoothly from her experience of dating apps to a withering takedown of the Manosphere, Qureshi is dryly funny in her social commentary and self-deprecating in chronicling her personal life, drawing the two together to great effect in her account of her sister's wedding to a white Yorkshireman. Jay Richardson

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