The Very Best of the Edinburgh Festivals 2024
Review: Assembly Hall
Review: Orchestra of Sound
Review: After the Silence
Character comedians can find their creations to be, at worst, mere caricatures and, at best, so successful as to entirely eclipse their makers.
Pippa Evans goes beyond just creating a character, furnishing her rock star Loretta Maine with an impressive repertoire of songs and a full backing band. With the voice and eloquent anger of Alanis Morissette mixed with the crass booziness of Courtney Love, Maine feels a tad dated. Many of her songs are clever and successful parodies of Jagged Little Pill album tracks, just 15 years too late. Still, the nostalgia isn’t unwelcome and it’s not something the singer fails to notice, slotting in a timely tribute to Lily Allen amid the 90s grunge.
The audience is never sure whether to love or hate Maine, who between crude songs about killing ex-boyfriends takes sharp and pithy swipes at woman’s magazines and the music industry. Evans’s talent is unquestionable, and never so clear as when she ad-libs an entire needy ballad to a male audience member. But Maine does at times feel one-dimensional, apparently loathing everything but revenge and the screw-tops on wine bottles. However, after an hour of this finely crafted show her insanity is catching, and the final song ‘Life Sucks’ makes for a paradoxically uplifting ending.
If Loretta Maine aims to shock, she has nothing on Dr George Ryegold. Created by Toby Williams, Ryegold is, on first impressions, a reasonable man. A stern and senior Henry Higgins type to begin, he soon descends into a sort of maniacally evil Stephen Fry. A struck-off surgeon, Ryegold now spends his days mulling over his past, despising humanity and plotting against the two year old living in the flat above. Miscarriages, defecation, Harold Shipman – Ryegold may have the voice for Radio 4 but certainly not the content.
Leaving no line uncrossed, Ryegold’s horrifying impropriety is countered by his stunning grasp of language – he produces the most poetic bigotry you are ever likely to hear. When he spins a beautifully worded spiel about the Haiti earthquake, its pitch-black punch line finds the audience terrified to laugh. Ryegold’s jokes lodge in the mind: you want to repeat them but they could only work with his wonderfully wordy delivery. The articulate monster has always been a fascinating figure and, as Ryegold demonstrates, you can get away with murder if you confess in the Queen’s English.
On a milder note is Jeremy Lion, brought to the Fringe after a four-year hiatus by comedian Justin Edwards. As a disgraced children’s TV presenter, Lion represents a familiar tabloid figure, but Edwards rejects the coke and strippers route and settles for the comparatively bland booze. It’s a joke that threatens to quickly tire as Lion smuggles cans into his routines in increasingly inventive manners. But Edwards ploughs on, pushing the joke to its limit before a hilarious, Buckfast-sodden finale.
Though this is by far the highlight, the preceding skits are still a joy to watch. Accompanied by his wooden-faced pianist, Lion plays out a cautionary tale about taking care of mother nature. Props break, seams split, and Lion frequently digresses to complain about his living situation, yet the show retains an element of choreography – particularly in the Danny Elfman-like songs Lion spews out between burps, which are far better than they have any right to be. Jeremy Lion is riotously daft and Edwards takes impressive lengths to give credibility to his alcoholic antihero, even if it means downing four pints in quick succession.