Human fixer-upper learns the hard way
Amy Gledhill: The Girl Before The Girl You Marry
Monkey Barrel Comedy (Venue 180), until 28 August
JJJJ
When relationships tend to unfold and end in the same manner, it’s a pattern. Yet when that pattern persists, well, it’s the stuff of Fringe comedy shows. And from successive breakups, Amy Gledhill of The Delightful Sausage double act has contrived a candid but upbeat debut solo show, silly in execution yet mature in the hard-won lessons she’s learned.
The Hull-born comic has come to see herself as a “human property developer”, fixing up men and improving them, before they then shack up with someone new and get married soon after. And although Gledhill characterises her natural audience as “the bullied” and evokes great sympathy for the story of how she came to dance and embarrass herself before the Queen as a teenager, she’s not a jilted victim. She owns and makes considerable lightness of even her most humiliating episodes.
Her narrative is suffused with tenderness, even for the cad who promised himself to her then almost immediately pledged himself to another out of social awkwardness. Gledhill has had enough water flow under the bridge to be charmingly magnanimous and offer up her anecdotes with wry detachment and a twinkle in her eye. Certainly – overlooking her wardrobe malfunction before the monarch – there is little past trauma that she can’t recast as an endearingly relatable cautionary tale.
Almost in spite of her girlish vivacity and baseline niceness, she finds herself the victorious protagonist in a vengeance subplot. And Gledhill has her happy ending, but satisfyingly focuses less on the lovey-dovey than the stupidity of her and her current beau, united in struggling through the misadventure of a date gone horribly awry.