A ray of eternal sunshine…
elation turns to dumbfoundedness, the pained look on his face as he struggles to comprehend life’s ironic cruelties hilarious in the act out.
Taking solace in his local café, conversations with the owner and his familiar routines, the narrative arcs gradually as he’s lifted from ennui into pursuing a dream, the tiny twists and turns skewing eccentrically as he arrives at acceptance.
Towards the end, his persona almost drops as he relates saying goodbye to a friend in Australia.
Though the surest glimpse yet into Kearns’ real life, his phrasing has always been that of the everyday conversational, albeit timed and tweaked with latent precision into a drolly amusing script with eruptions into the roaringly funny.
Alive in the room, ad-libbing to the audience’s reaction, Kearns is hugely impressive. Pacing the hour capably, he endears with the knowing acknowledgement that this playful weirdness is how he makes his living. JAY RICHARDSON Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) JJJJ Australian comic Bec Hill is a multi-coloured ray of eternal sunshine. In a world of pain and darkness, her total lack of cynicism is refreshing. It helps that she’s funny and charming with it, of course.
This year, she’s decided to move away from the narrative-led nature of her previous shows with a fun little experiment in which the audience gets to decide the running order of her act.
Behind her on a blackboard are several cards with subjects and quotes written on them: Video Tape, Have You Been Working Out?, Egg Bum, that sort of thing. Hill encourages us to choose which one she has to talk about next. Occasionally they’ll deliberately choose one that segues naturally from the previous topic,
0 Australian comic Bec Hill’s show will leave you with a smile on your face much to Hill’s delight. This simple deconstruction of her own act emphasises how easily she moves between different modes of comedy. Puns, songs, prop-work, quick-fire gags and extended personal anecdotes nestle together comfortably in her all-inclusive world.
The highlight of any Hill show is always her brightly inventive animated artwork, which she displays on flipcharts customised with hidden levers and tiny glitter cannons. They allow her to indulge her love of whimsical wordplay and endearingly puerile, childish jokes.
At one point she reads out jokes written by actual children, most of which are genuinely funny and bizarre.
She also unveils a gleefully dark and offensive pop-up book she created at the age of 14, tells the alarming story of show peopled with recognisable Scots rather than the tartan tat versions we’re so often fed. The young and young-at-heart cast put in charming performances – Sean Mitchell’s TV producer is a standout – and the new songs by Willie Logan and the show’s writer, John Murray, if not immediately catchy, are delivered with conviction.
There’s one stone-cold classic in there, Mary’s Prayer, and while it’s nicely performed by Michael Mclean’s Andrew, it jars against the original material. If this show is developed further, swapping it out for another new tune might not be a bad idea. And the title should be far more relevant to the show; at the moment it’s just a matter of characters occasionally mentioning that something is, or isn’t, just like the movies.
The dancing is fun, even if you’re not a particular fan of the form, and by the end the audience was clapping away merrily alongside the formidable feet of the girls.
While feeling far from fully how her boyfriend proposed to her onstage at the Gilded Balloon, and asks us to question whether space travel magnate Elon Musk might actually be a supervillain.
Admittedly, this show is greater than the sum of its purposefully disjointed parts, but I can’t imagine anyone leaving it without a big old goofy smile on their face. PAUL WHITELAW formed, there’s a rough charm to this show that carries it along. MARTIN GRAY Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) JJ Alice Fraser is all done up like a sexy little devil, with corset and little red padded wings. There’s not a lot of point to the costume, but it is probably good for marketing.
Fraser is trying to take on the big subjects of good and evil, right and wrong, with reference to history, politics and her own family. It’s all got a bit lost in translation. Her stories meander about and are hard to follow and her take on history and politics is confusing and unconvincing.
A weird heckle adds to the confusion and creates a tension Fraser doesn’t manage to diffuse. CLAIRE SMITH