Lou Sanders: And Now for a Nice Evening with Wallan

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When you’re spending August in the Attic—famously one of the Fringe’s muggiest rooms— you really need to grab the crowd’s attention, and keep a firm grip. Lou Sanders achieves this by making a big entrance every few minutes: a spectacular wheel-based beginning, then a more graceful arrival via stepladder, plus numerous costume changes because “I’m the comedy Beyonce.” 

She’s kidding, despite that come-hither, finger-in-the-mouth flyer you may have been handed recently. There’s a disarming moment during the prologue where Sanders admits that the ironically sultry photo has been taken seriously by some recipients. Back in character, the mock narcissism gives way to naked ambition as she resolves for this show to out-spectacular the competition, which it subsequently does in a wonderfully undignified manner. The competitor who crashes and burns is invariably more memorable than the winner. 

So what is Wallan? Our hostess explains via a series of spiritual videos that accompany her regular trips offstage, and clearly this mysterious power does for Lou Sanders what The Force did for Luke Skywalker. Only a comic channelling something cosmic would dare perform such Herculean tasks for a paying audience, in an attic: trolley-dashing with an injured woman, a dramatic petrol/paddling pool stunt and, most, dangerously, the application of Lynx in a confined space. 

This show won’t change your life—unless you too embrace Wallan—but the 50 minutes fly by, which is rare for a room ventilated like a Finnish sauna. “Only two walkouts,” she says proudly, before making up spurious rumours about the quitters, one of whom then suddenly returns from the loo. All entertainingly awkward.