Fringereviews

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe may be drawing to a close, but we still have some shows to recommend to our readers

strut of the successful young man. But his petty triumphs are over the railcard system, the child of his girlfriend’s ex and the brother not invited on the family holiday like this favourite eldest son, his pyrrhic victory at sharing a room and accompanying bathroom with his parents encapsulated in the circumstances begetting the expression “Schrödinger’s Wank”.

A career in comedy has further retarded the development of someone who was never the quickest to embrace adulthood, and a reunion with his school friends, once so close that they shared a porn stash, humiliates him with their awareness borne from having proper jobs.

Rather than research the issues in depth though, this trivia fiend instead resolved to learn every one of the UK’S MPS, their party and constituency, which he subsequently proves in a feat of memory that belies his dreadful 2009 appearance on The Weakest Link. So Graham’s grasp of politics remains amusingly slight, even if it’s as much as many of us manage and he suggests that we also check the privilege of our Establishment overlords. Really though, it’s just a unifying thread for a series of exceptionally strong, personal anecdotes loaded with great lines. JAY RICHARDSON

Nothing suggests any level of artifice when Byron reveals early on, for example, that his politics are decidedly left-wing, and he takes aim at the government regularly throughout; though, if anyone did want to create a performance poet character, this trait would probably have been the first box ticked. His lines are often softly delivered in the tones of a professional actor, and his subjects are diverse. If this is Byron or Robertson’s first spoken word show, or both, it has their career off to a solid start. DAVID POLLOCK Banshee Labyrinth (Venue 156) JJJ This is a sort of a fairytale. The kind that involves a prince looking for love. Also the kind that involves murder, dismemberment, violence and a lot of prince on prince sex. Rob Cawsey manages,wordlessly, to make the audience so sympathetic to him that we lend him money. It is a clever show about very unclever things happening to the gormless Rob. He is cartoonishly tragi-comic and so no matter whether he is making a member of the audience accessory to murder or involving them in sordid sex, we love him.

As well as a face more mobile than a contortionist’s ribcage, Rob has, quite literally, in his corner, Benji, a tech so brilliantly deadpangoing-on-pissed-off funny that he is worth a star on his own. He is a huge presence (no pun intended, Benji) in the hour.

This is not a pretty show. But it is pretty wonderful. KATE COPSTICK for Shakespearean tragedy. The growling, scruffy dynamo bounds across the stage, snatching beer from the front row and showering the audience in crisps in demonstration of a trick he played as a child involving a car exhaust and a bag of dog dirt.

This fourth wall-busting adds to Goody’s air of menace and unpredictability, and the revelation that his daughter has recently died adds to the temperature as the sympathy we feel for him is counterbalanced by the fear that he could do anything. In this respect Sascha Moore’s script has to work hard to keep up with the ferocity of the performance, and a delicately composed finale built around Goody’s childlike need for companionship is popped somewhat by a soap operatically tragic turn. DAVID POLLOCK Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) JJJ We begin with an ending – the final song of the last gig played by the noisy, fourpiece power-punk ensemble onstage before they break up. Farewell, they say, inviting us to remember the good times we had together before they’re gone for good. That Merce Ribot and Patricia Rodriguez, the two young women fronting the band, are Spanish is a weighty point which can’t be ignored; this is Brexit as band-split-dueto-creative-differences, and like any gig which adheres to a truly punk spirit, it’s a riot of invention and risk-taking.

Created by Ribot and Rodriguez (the artistic directors of Little Soldier Productions) alongside bandmates and guest actors Dan Lees and Thomas Abela, Derailed is winningly packed with ideas, from a choreographed scene where the audience bombard them with scripted heckles about their right to protest in a country which isn’t “their own” to the live crowd-sourcing and posting of a random online petition, to Ribot’s live-calling her own father in Spain (only this Fringe’s second most exciting such scene). . DAVID POLLOCK