Clare Plested: Flock Up

Can your choice of venue change your material? Clare Plested was at Ciao Roma last year too, the lower floor of a family-run restaurant which is slap-bang in the centre of South Bridge. It benefits from a steady catchment of tourists staggering past in single file, ripe for being shepherded into a free event that also sells ice cream upstairs.

You can’t help but wonder, as Plested’s latest show progresses, whether she’s tailored her character-based material accordingly, cutting out the sort of stuff that doesn’t work so well with such a broad audience. Anything subtle or nuanced, essentially. 

Clearly a confident performer, Plested was previously in the acclaimed comedy theatre duo Plested and Brown – with Adam Brown, who went on to become a famous Hobbit. There’s a sense that a lot more thought has gone into the performance here than the writing.

Not that this random assortment of punters seems to mind, as she covers the creative shortfalls with lots of enthusiastic waving and shouting. The show gets off to an unpromising start with an oddly interrogatory burger queen—a laboured pun on "grilling"—but there are two half-decent character ideas. There's an embittered wellness instructor who just chants healthy words, and the big finale, a Disney-fuelled children’s entertainer who fears change then whips her charges into a play-acting frenzy. Well, most of them.

It all goes down pretty well, in truth, but just doesn’t seem very 'Fringe'. Plested is probably the only comic here whose ideal audience might be a hen party.