Tales of a conception battle give birth to a bouncy new star
The Edinburgh Festival is all about trying. Trying to get noticed. Trying to get to the show on time. Trying to spot the next big thing. Trying to live every moment.
In the case of Laura Lexx’s (I suspect, breakthrough) new comedy hour, “trying” refers to the business of conception – yearning for a baby but finding out with your partner, month after month, that it’s not yet happening. A common enough painful occurrence – and cause for anguish. But in the Brighton-based comic’s case, just three months of “trying” left her medicated for chronic depression and anxiety.
It turns out that the 31-year-old had something akin to premature postnatal depression – she grew so worried about protecting her hypothetical newborn that she went into overdrive about the future of the environment, and became an eco-worrier. That sounds bleak, but Lexx brings such effervescent delight to her tale of hopes dashed that she’s produced a show that somehow throws you up in the air, inducing giggling delight, at the same time as it delivers a lurch to the stomach. One moment she’s sombrely asking us to consider depression as a terminal disease – having extolled the life-saving virtues of anti-depressants – the next she’s affirming that she’d like to be cremated so her ashes can be used for pranks.
We don’t get a blow-byblow account of her non-birth pangs. Instead, this hyper-garrulous figure – whose warm approachability puts you in mind of Sarah Millican, and whose smiliness recalls the ever-beaming Victoria
Wood – tent-pegs her chat around a nostalgic camping holiday in France she took with her closest family last year, in a bid to recapture a childhood sense of safety. This affords lots of sharp-eyed reminiscences about the pre-digital world of the Nineties (surprisingly Seventies in its low-tech way) – and relatable sharing about family tensions: “When there’s only a zip between you and your mother’s opinion of you, it’s not enough, is it?”
The most distressing moment comes when it dawns on her, courtesy of a needless electric soap-dispenser at the campsite, that she hasn’t escaped her dread, and she goes into a stream-of-consciousness relay of her accelerating panic. She knows she’s over-reacting, she explains, it’s just that her brain won’t let her rationalise herself back to calmness.
By this point, she’s built up such a rapport that you don’t recoil, but instead admire the strength of character that has enabled her to stand on stage and see the funny side. Throw in some lovely quips about cosmetic retailer Lush (“We don’t sell shampoo, we sell fudge putty for hair”), a gripping tale about a pregnant tropical fish named Mary Berry, and some enjoyably terrible puns and you’re left cheering the birth of a bouncy, bubbly stand-up star.