Wendy Wason's Flashbacks

It’s hard to keep your show's early momentum going when your first anecdote is interrupted by a chap wandering in several minutes late, sitting slap-bang in the middle of the front row then noisily searching his bag and creaking his chair throughout. Sabotage from one of the many exes who get a mention in Wendy Wason’s show, perhaps?

The Edinburgh-born comic is, as she admits before that rude interruption, “cutting it a bit fine” this year. Due to give birth just as the Fringe finishes, she flags up the likelihood of "pregnant brain" kicking in and sentences trailing off as she loses her thread, which does indeed happen more than once.

Flashbacks is one of the wider themes at this year’s festival—everything that’s happened in her life so far—but the anecdotes are rattled off without any great enthusiasm, or indeed response from the mid-afternoon crowd. There’s a sense that, entirely understandably given the circumstances, Wason might not have given the writing here quite the care and attention she normally would. Several promising setups are curtailed before their comic potential is fully explored, and the mother of two only really comes alive when she brings her story back to the present day and lets rip about her own kids.

Her off-the-cuff gags about pregnancy are also significantly sharper than the growing-up stuff, and you wonder why she went down the Flashbacks route when a more relevant theme was right under her nose. Instead, that glorious belly is the elephant in the room.