Who says birth isn’t a laughing matter?
That said, she does characterise the stabbing pain in her back during pregnancy as a prominent Tory politician, permit her violent dislike of the megarich to radiate off her and is generally only a seething bite of the tongue from instigating all-out class war.
But it’s her whole maternal experience that is at the heart of this show, and it seems to have been a typically rollercoaster one, even if she ascribes an extra lack of preparedness to her and her partner’s approach to contraception to their leaning too hard on modern digital technology.
Still, she has absorbed and more-or-less convincingly parrots an argument for why her daughter is not catastrophic further carbon footprints but a boon for the environment. And her faith in Greta Thunberg and her fellow activist teenagers is only slightly qualified by the mercilessness of girls that age and her reluctant need for self-agency.
As for many of us, Long’s eco-concerns are everpresent but exist as a background hum, as she scrambles to adjust to motherhood. With some wider changes in society but not enough, as outdated notions about acceptable topics for stand-up persist and she continues to experience abuse simply for doing her job, she offers a wry and often hilariously detailed account of her labour.
The message that children reacquaint us with our better selves is sentimental. But it’s well-earned after an hour of near-constant laughs.
Until 25 August. Today: 8:20pm. Assembly George Square Studios – Five (Venue 17) JJJ
Jena Friedman has a brilliant comic mind, with a dark, uncompromising style easy to admire. A social commentator of perception, the American’s bleak perspective was forged in her ancestors’ foresight to flee the Nazis. She has prioritised politics over the personal in her comedy career, giving her stand-up a strong sense of clarity and purpose.
But the rise of Donald Trump has tilted her grim world-view from gallows humour into nihilism. And for the first time, she discloses some information on her boyfriend and their plans for parenthood. These might loosely be characterised as contingency and typically introduce some unsparing analysis of the war on women, the overlooked miscarriages and femicides, the pornography of true crime narratives.
Satirically cutting-edge, frequently brutal, you could isolate any number of Friedman’s lines and marvel at their elegant, rapier wit. Yet while she’s conscious of and manipulates audience discomfort – especially men’s – her brusque, flippant delivery isn’t the most effective conveyance. Indeed, when she reveals her personal connection to last year’s Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, she is visibly out of her comfort zone. But by opening up more, sugaring the bitter pills ever so slightly, she’d be an almighty force to be reckoned with.
JAY RICHARDSON
JAY RICHARDSON
DAVID POLLOCK
Until 25 August. Today 9:20pm. performer Hannah Batt and director James Nash – both of whom wrote the text – create here is on a frankly miniscule scale by comparison, just an assemblage of rinsed-clean recyclables which coalesce into a cityscape, but the hopes behind it are just as big.
Conceptually, the pair’s Anorak Theatre company have created a piece which is slight in duration, yet ambitious – and successfully so – in impact. Using simple but effective meta-theatrical tricks within tricks (the piece is bookended by a letter from Nash which speculates as to our experience of the piece) Batt lulls us into the now by describing where we are in the room, even addressing one or two of us in person, and then drags us into the future by imagining that we have woken to a world a thousand years from now, where people trek ritually between cities and plastic is for museums only.
The ecological message is simple and story development is slight, but in the HG Wellsian atmosphere and delivery of the piece, Batt and Nash have created a captivating short work.
Until 17 August. Today 12:50pm
CLAIRE SMITH
funny slide show – which includes pictures of her grandmothers and of herself in various school and university productions.
Braine is a musical magpie, a great collector of accents, styles and ideas and her show is bursting with visual and musical jokes. It’s all a bit scattergun, but this is a highly enjoyable hour.
Until 25 August. Today 6pm.