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lines of daydream and reality, as an audience begins to question this woman’s sanity. It’s how a proper Fringe show should be. (Thomas Meek) ■ The Stand, 558 7272, until 29 Aug, 4.15pm, £8 (£7).
ARJ BARKER Disappointing gaggery from much- hyped actor ●●●●●
At the top of the show, Arj Barker promises fresh material, points out the contemporary fashion for honesty and vulnerability in comedy, and (whether fairly or not) has drawn a sell-out crowd due to being Dave from Flight of the Conchords. Sounds good, yes? Then the jokes start and the promise evaporates. There’s nothing revolutionary in gags about Pluto not being a planet any more, porn DVD titles being similar to real film titles or Nigerian internet scams. With no clever twists or added dimensions he may as well be riffing about airplane food.
Pedestrian material can be elevated by delivery but this too was misjudged. Stumbling over words and
a weird mic technique in which lines were alternately spoken into the microphone and shouted unamplified contributed to an uncharismatic performance. What may have made for a passable 20-minute set in a comedy club fell far short of a Fringe show. There are many, many great acts this year who didn’t star in a hit HBO series. Go see one of them. (Suzanne Black) ■ Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, until 29 Aug, 9.20pm, £12–£14 (£11–£13).
referential as you’d expect from anyone who spends enough time around Stewart Lee. Especially satisfying are the references to the couple’s cat, Boo Boo, which blur the NEXT ISSUE OUT WEDNESDAY 25 AUGUST
Festival Comedy
Telephone Booking Fringe 0131 226 0000 International Festival 0131 473 2000 Book Festival 0845 373 5888 Art Festival 07500 461 332 GEORGE RYEGOLD A gloriously bleak worldview ●●●●●
They say that doctors have the blackest sense of humour; something to do with all those birth, death and boils in their everyday lives. Comic Toby Williams’ creation Dr George Ryegold epitomises that sentiment. A vision in corduroy, he grumbles to a roomful of people that his reason for turning to stand-up was an unfair dismissal that saw him sent home to mother where he soon tired of hours filled with David Dickinson, Noel Edmonds and all the other trappings of daytime TV. Ryegold’s is a gloriously wrong outlook on life, with his verbose spoutings on miscarriage, abortion and China’s one-child policy, plus his Shipman-on-rollerblades impersonation has you positively choking in gleeful disbelief. There is some tightening up to be done here though and you get the impression that at the moment it would work better as a 30-minute set. But Ryegold does have the evil edge and magnificent turn of phrase to be, potentially, quite brilliant. (Marissa Burgess) ■ Pleasance Dome, 556 6550, until 30 Aug, 10pm, £9–£9.50 (£7.50–£8).
BRIDGET CHRISTIE Dabbling around the unhinged fringes of stand-up ●●●●●
Bridget Christie openly admits that her act may not be the most commercially viable around. But you can’t help but feel the Fringe would be a bit more interesting if other performers were willing to forsake financial security and the welfare of a toddler to open a stand-up show dressed as an ant with goggles. For a piece of performance theatre, it not only provides an interesting, angered take on public and critical perceptions of the role of women in comedy, but also allows us to laugh at ant-based puns.
As a comedy tactic, it’s triumph-ant Her less etymological material isn’t quite so certain in its brilliance, but the stories are as dark, farcical and
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32 THE LIST 19–26 Aug 2010
PAUL CHOWDHRY Self-censorship blunts some impact ●●●●● ‘I’ve got more fans than audience members,’ jokes Paul Chowdhry of the ratio of people in the room to cooling devices. Granted, it’s not ideal circumstances in which to perform a show but Chowdhry, allowing himself censorship on some gags he felt he couldn’t do in front of 11 people, soldiered on. His show is about those things that ordinarily you can’t say; as he points out, being a British-Asian man he gets away with gags about his own ancestry, but what of other
cultures? Well, he believes in equal opportunities and there’s no accent he can’t or won’t do so that everyone comes in for a ribbing. This is the kind of material he’s been provoking
audiences and making them laugh with on the circuit for years and it’s a pleasure to hear him create a full hour of it. Just a shame he felt he had to curtail some of the material for a small but receptive audience. (Marissa Burgess) ■ Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, until 30 Aug, 10.45pm, £10.50–£12.50 (£9–£11).