Lou Sanders in Another Great Show Again

Lou Sanders is here to sell calendars. That’s a central conceit of her pleasingly bonkers second run at the Free Fringe, where last year she built up a good head of steam for her confident, daft and refreshingly different standup act. Each page of the calendar features Sanders herself posing with a different vegetable, and is adorned with an intentionally awful piece of wordplay: “This will be a good month, kumquat may.”

Sanders has the delivery of a hyperactive teenager: lines are seemingly thrown away casually, eyes are rolled, hair is tossed, reported conversations between herself and her nephews are full “he was like…” and “I was like…” She jumps from setpiece to setpiece with jarring abruptness, challenging the audience to keep up with wherever she fancies going.

We have semi-confessional sections on ex-boyfriends; a spoof of an educational school play featuring an all-singing, all-dancing vagina; and readings of Sanders’ own ‘erotic stories’ that interrupt the prurient fantasy with real-world details. “Her breasts were so large,” Sanders purrs, “that… she actually had to get them reduced on the NHS.”

It’s restless, breathlessly self-reflective stuff that never lets Sanders or her audience sit still for a moment. Even her gleefully shambolic persona is undercut near the start of the set, when she solemnly informs us that, whatever it looks like, she’s totally in control.

This is quite true, but not everyone in the room tonight is willing to follow her on each flight of fancy. This should come as Sanders builds the cult following that she needs and deserves. As it is, this show is refreshing and a lot of fun; once she finds her audience, it could become a total riot.