Outstanding stand-up stuff

Last year was the worst of John Robins’s life. Bowie died, Prince died and Robins’ long- term relationship broke up, leaving him single at the age of 35.

To begin, Robins affects a kind of forced chippy cheerfulness. He’s a comedian, he’ll write a break-up show. Everything will be fine. After beginning with a riff about celebrity deaths Robins cracks, briefly, telling us how awful his life has become, before returning to what he does, telling jokes, moving around the stage, connecting with the audience.

This is a show full of big hearty laughs – but Robins plays it as a man on the edge, letting us see the quiet desperation burning behind his eyes. He lists the advantages of being single, but can’t really find any, beyond being able to use all the plug sockets in his flat. He tries to celebrate by buying ugly furniture but it ends up as a symbol of his despair.

Robins exploits his misery for every single possible laugh – transforming his pain into one long existential comic howl against the human condition.

Being alone is awful. He doesn’t want to play the field. He doesn’t really like other people and he can’t even buy a chest of drawers without it turning into a disaster.

As Robins descends further into his own emotional dysfunction you wonder what the circumstances of the break-up were. But he doesn’t trade in accusations and nothing negative is said about the other person. Nothing at all.

Instead as the emotional intensity increases, little details of the story emerge. It is a sad, universal story, of love and loneliness, told in an unexpectedly comic way.

Finally, after laughing solidly for an hour, you may begin to feel some little tears pricking at the corner of your eyes.

Jimmy Mcghie’s Tribal Gathering

Laughing Horse @ The Pear Tree (Venue 257)

For anyone who hasn’t seen one in Edinburgh yet, this is a stand-up comedy show. No moving X-factor type back story, no thought provoking revelations and no inspirational meme-type ending.

Having said that, at one point Jimmy looks pained and gets out a tissue, but it transpires that his profuse sweatiness has melted the product in his hair and it is running into his eyes and stinging. A warning to all Redken Curvacious Waves users out there. But that aside, this is stand-up. Comedy. A dying art form up here. Thank goodness Jimmy Mcghie is kissing it back to life.

And he has things to say – about recycled opinions, newspaper questionnaires, poshness, the death of decent music festivals and following

storytellers Katie Underhay and Anthony Burbridge arrive bursting to tell us a story. They’ve been wandering a remote landscape for months, never seeing a soul – and now we’re here, they just have to share something with us.

And so begins the Tale of the Cockatrice, a monster that’s part-snake, part-bat, part-cockerel, hatched from an egg buried beneath an old priory. The story itself is diverting rather than gripping, but Underhay and Burbridge have a friendly, approachable style that draws us in.

The stand-out skill here, however, is puppetry. A huge amount of thought has gone into the set design, and when Underhay turns an ordinary standard lamp into a nun, it’s a moment of real wonder. The cockatrice, too has been well crafted, clopping around the stage in all its bizarre splendour. A storyline which took its time to unfold at the start suddenly speeds up towards the end, leading to a lack of clarity and little sense of dramatic tension. Which, given the skill and ingenuity at play here, is a shame. sex tourism for a great holiday. He berates Baby Boomers and despises Millennials and whichever you are you will love it because this is hilarious.

He had a recent comedic near-death experience on a cruise ship, he was a fat child, and he is bad at relationships and all are grist to his comedy mill. I am so glad his parents divorced or we would not have the Jimmy we have today.

The hour is absolutely rammed with funny and I have not seen anyone else this month packing so many intelligent laughs per minute.

Laughs per minute is not the be-all and end-all of comedy but Mcghie’s show comes like a quality G&T after a day of icky cocktails and reminds you that an hour of pure stand up can be a great thing.

Jimmy Mcghie has plenty to say about many things, and the hour, crammed with funny, is refreshing.

The Inane Chicanery of a Certain Adam GC Riches

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23)

Back performing solo again, to his usual high standards of nonsense, Adam Riches is sat miming some intense piano as the audience enters. Dressed in a kilt, and with Celtic swagger, the macho actor he’s chosen to send up this year is Scotland’s very own Gerard Butler, a tricky act of parody given the subject matter, yet one he channels into his first, chaotic bit of audience participation, involving some William Tellstyle marksmanship.

With anyone in a broad radius of the target a potential victim of the scattershot skit, it’s a rambunctious start to the hour, but not the most quicksilver of Riches’ career. The unfortunate mark he’s plucked from the front row is not the sharpest in intuiting his directions. That’s a trend carried into a reprisal of his Guy You Meet After A Long Term Relationship character, with a woman failing to pick up his cues. Of course, that’s part of the appeal of a Riches show and he’s in his element scrambling to ad-lib. Moreover, he has more luck with the intimate daftness he asks a young lad to endure with his singing hobo, The Drifter, this game young man getting right onboard with the character’s catchphrase and borderline perverted request.

He also strikes gold with the expressive couple he picks to declare their love for each other on his person, the characteristics of alterego Royston Baldcock III not worth mentioning beyond his love of calligraphy and hilariously breathy adoration of the lost art of penmanship. Performing some stunt BMX hi-jinks without a bike but still plenty of jeopardy, before a truly committed and genuinely disgusting finale, Inane Chicanery is a chaotic, knockabout farce with flashes of strong, character-establishing writing beneath the improvised unpredictability.

Donors

thespace on the Mile (Venue 39)

The premise behind this new two-hander from Little Mount Theatre Company is simple and attention-grabbing: what if a woman, in her mid-30s and the midst of an existential crisis about being childless at this point in her life, visits a fertility clinic and decides that the handsome young man on reception would be the best way to get pregnant? It’s something to do with the hormones released during the act, she believes, which makes physical sex more likely to result in a child than artificial means.

Nicholas Contreras’s script delivers a mature look at the situation which doesn’t shy away from the mechanics of the act, even as it invests itself with astuteness and wisdom in the very different emotional responses of the characters concerned.

While Linda, seeking to fill a void in her soul, views the situation as a purely business transaction, young Roy feels the effect of constant sex is making him fall in love. Actors Megan Lloydjones and Ben Lamontagneschenck – who direct themselves – capably channel a script which examines love, fertility and what it is to be a parent these days.

With the superior insecurity only an accomplished standup can project, Amy Howerska has had a reasonably varied life and possesses the wry, mischievous wit to capitalise on it. She’s overcome certain obstacles but wonders why, for all her Oxford education and attractive qualities, she still hasn’t quite nailed the career or relationship.

Goddess is wide-ranging in scope and lacks focus. But Howerska is sardonic, charismatic and teasing, offering gossip about Minnie Driver and Michael Fassbender from her former employment at the British Film Institute and an impression of Bobcat Goldthwait that’s cruel but delicious caricature of a skilled fellow stand-up.

Anxiety about her class, womb and parental example feed into the angst that powers her hour as she paints a picture of someone who’s never quite fitted in wherever she’s been, taking jobs on the basis of her boss’s accidental capacity to amuse her.

Although her thoughts are narrowly self-centred and tend towards the confessional, she is capable of making broader social comment, a generic bit about having a man’s body for a day suddenly switching into bleak satire, rounding out a woolly but diverting hour.

Cult-ure

thespace on North Bridge (Venue 36)

The Facility appears to be a place of rest, where troubled young people can go to recover amid periods of mental and emotional disturbance; yet it soon reveals itself as something more disturbing, with a cult-like presence exercising psychological control over the inhabitants. Bind Theatre’s ensemble piece is the acme of young Fringe theatre, with variable performances – some of them very promising – and a cheap thriller twist deputising for levels of real emotional insight.