Festival Comedy
As the last ever Perrier winner, Laura Solon moved into the big league working with Harry Enfield and Al Murray. Julian Hall finds she has chosen the right moment to finally return BUNNY GIRL
A s a comedian who performs with a great deal of poise and has a taut, controlled quality about her, I wonder if Laura Solon is going to prove a somewhat distant subject for interview. My apprehension is soon dispelled in our small talk during which she describes having a ‘life-changing starter’ in a restaurant we both know in London. ‘I’m not joking, it was amazing,’ she adds as if in character. The potential superpowers of the main course and the dessert duly discussed, we come to why the last-ever Perrier Award winner has been away from Edinburgh since that glorious run of 2005 to concentrate on her own Radio 4 series, and appearing on TV shows Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry and Paul, Al Murray’s Multiple Personality Disorder and Laura, Ben and Him.
‘I’ve wanted to do another live show ever since. I have only ever really done one and that was not that planned in advance. For the first few years since the Perrier I had radio recordings in August and then last year I could have gone but I couldn’t quite think what I wanted to do.’ Solon, now 30, knows that the problem of fitting multi-character comics into a narrative is a tough challenge. ‘In 2005, I did nine monologues in a row that I had been doing on the circuit and then turned them into the show. This year, I needed a concept that allows me to do lots of different voices and people in 50 minutes with a loose story and to use the space of a venue that I didn’t really get to do in the back room of a pub!’ From The Holyrood Tavern back then with Kopfrapers Syndrome, Solon moves now to the giddy heights of the Assembly Rooms’ Wildman Room for Rabbit Faced Story Soup. She jokes that it’s ‘the latecomer room’, but whatever its idiosyncrasies, it’s a nice space that has housed some great female acts including Kristen Schaal and Maria Bamford. Solon is excited about playing with both the space and some props to boot. Her central idea, she reveals, features an author going missing while finishing his book and has Solon portraying all his characters
12 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 6–13 Aug 2009