The Scotsman Festival Sessions: Susie McCabe visits B&Q

Six years after her first Scotsman Session, Susie McCabe and society have both changed dramatically. As her latest sessions video reveals, the comedian is surprised to find herself a committed gardener, taking time out from the stresses of preparing her latest Edinburgh Fringe hour, her ninth show in just over a decade, to pop into her local B&Q for weed-killer and fence paint.

She's also struggling to process the incongruity of her home city simultaneously hosting both the Commonwealth Games and a fascist rally.

“This was the first place to give Nelson Mandela the freedom of the city!” cries the Glaswegian stand-up, who spoke at a counter demonstration organised by Stand Up To Racism and Women Against The Far Right Scotland. “Yet here we have these guys running about in chainmail, waving St George's flags. That's got to stop. It's ridiculous. St George was brought up in Palestine!”

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A self-declared “mouthy Lefty”, McCabe's latest show, Coming of Rage, culminates in her taking pops at Brexit voters, Manosphere grifters, boomers and Gen Z. Every generation in fact, for their complicity in the current evils of the world. The devoted football fan reckons “we've all taken our eye of the ball thinking fascism won't happen again. History tells us everything's cyclical”.

For a queer performer, the recent Glasgow Pride was, as ever, “a protest with a bit of celebration”. She was taken in by the city's gay scene (and her grandmother) after her devout Catholic parents kicked her out as a teenager due to her sexuality. And it pains McCabe to see “division within the LGBTQ community” about “whether the trans community is a part of us.

“We need strength in numbers” she maintains. “Because if certain people get into power we will see a rollback of our rights as surely as the right to abortion is rolling back in America.”

In June, McCabe spoke to pupils at her old school, St Ambrose High in Coatbridge, offering a typically unvarnished assessment of the challenges awaiting them in adulthood. For her own part, she's learned to temper her anger with craft and cunning, even if it's been a hard lesson. Coming of Rage reflects that within 18 months “I was angry that my dad died. That my marriage ended. That I had a heart attack. I'm angry at Donald Trump. I'm angry at everything. But I still have to laugh and hold these things up in a way that makes us look at them in a different way.”

Her father's funeral is a tale that audiences have been responding to. And though it simmers and seethes with resentment of the Catholic Church's businesslike insensitivity and petty bureaucracy, it's also suffused with love, hilarity and tenderness for anyone who's buried a parent.

“The rigmarole of the arrangements is sadly something almost all of us will go through,” McCabe acknowledges. “But the minutiae, with that added layer of Catholic ritual, is something we can all laugh at as well. Just the ridiculousness of the details. I get so frustrated. But I'm trying to be analytical rather than angry”.

Susie McCabe: Coming of Rage is at the Gordon Aikman Theatre George Square until 30 August as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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