Edinburgh Fringe reviews: Emmanuel Sonubi, Kate Barron, Larry Dean, Manic Street Creature, Susie McCabe
A guide to comedy and theatre at this year’s Fringe festival
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You’ll struggle to find a comedian with a more arresting stage presence than Emmanuel Sonubi. Before Sonubi was a comedian, he worked as a bouncer, but he doesn’t want his outer appearance to give the wrong impression. “Up here, it’s all Disney,” he explains, pointing to his head before indicating his body. “Out there? Crimewatch.”
He might have honed his comic craft on the club circuit, but there’s nothing about Sonubi’s show that feels generic. He’s an engaging storyteller with a viewpoint and past that, it’s fair to say, you don’t hear from often in comedy. One particular story about a drunk punter who claimed Sonubi assaulted him – culminating in Sonubi, the police and the boy’s embarrassed father watching back the CCTV footage of him crashing into walls – is side-splittingly funny.
His background as a doorman means Sonubi is supremely unfazed by the rowdy Saturday afternoon crowd here to see him. He picks on a 16-year-old in the crowd about going through puberty and jokes that he’s going to “f*** with someone else’s relationship” within the crowd. When drunken audience members heckle and oh-so-unsubtly try to use the bathroom, he eviscerates them with an eye roll and cutting comment.
But for all that exterior bravado, Sonubi isn’t afraid to be vulnerable on stage. He discusses his love of musical theatre and, in one poignant moment, the time he nearly died on stage and ended up in the ICU. He ends the set discussing how divided our society is in a way that feels genuinely original and sincere. There are roaring laughs, but also depths in this excellent debut.
Kate Barron: Losing Myself – Just The Tonic at The Tron ★★★☆☆
Canadian comedian Kate Barron isn’t afraid to get a little gross on stage. One moment, she’s describing sex acts in graphic detail. The next, she’s miming a man slowly eating a tuna sandwich opposite her on a train to gag-worthy, stomach-churning laughs.
Barron now lives in the UK and kicks off her set with clever observational material on the ways British people expect you to be able to identify their schools, parents’ jobs and supermarkets of choice on accent alone. In other moments, her show can feel a little more obvious. There’s a whole section on how the Disney princesses were really quite messed up. It’s a topic so well worn that there desperately needs to be a moratorium on it.
In her more personal moments, Barron talks about her recent decision to have weight-loss surgery. She refutes the idea that this was any kind of easy way out and, in an emotional routine, discusses travelling to Turkey to have the operation in the middle of Covid, despite being a high-risk individual.
It’s a tender story, but one that jars with the fat jokes Barron has made throughout the set. That’s not to say that comedians can’t joke about this subject (Sofie Hagen’s current Fringe show Fat Jokes tackles this subject with nuance), but Barron’s position post-surgery makes them harder to land. She qualifies the set by saying that she never wants to make anyone in the audience feel bad based on her own choices, but the messaging feels muddled.
Larry Dean: Fudnut – Monkey Barrel Comedy ★★★★★
Larry Dean and his director have a theory that you can tell the darkest jokes when you underscore them with fun music. In the first five minutes of his new show, we see the Scottish comedian gyrating to “Blame It On The Boogie”, pausing only to joke about attempting suicide. Believe it or not, it sets the tone for Fudnut pretty damn well.
On the one hand, we see Dean, the stand-up and multiple Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominee, at the top of his game. There’s expert observational humour: notes on the differences between Glasgow and Edinburgh accents culminating in an eerily accurate Kevin Bridges impersonation and commentary on the ways people change themselves in relationships (“We’ve all been walking through a farmer’s market like ‘I miss cocaine’,” he moans). There’s also material on having sex with his boyfriend and on kinks, among which comes the line: “I’m going to talk about cuckolding now and I’m going to make you guys watch,” which might just be a late contender for my most underrated joke of the Fringe.
In a light-hearted bit about TikTok users diagnosing themselves with serious medical conditions, Dean explains that he himself has recently learnt he has ADHD. It’s the reason he’s so willing to take the show off on tangents based on heckles or weird laughs from the audience. In other comedians, it could feel like a production being derailed. With Dean, it’s part of the craft.
There is a turn in the final act of “Fudnut”where the crowd gasps, then goes silent. It’s a moment that shocks, but never feels like a cheap trick – one of those moments where you realise that this is why he’s talked about certain issues in certain ways and callbacks are explained. This affecting pay-off elevates “Fudnut” from a superb piece of stand-up to something truly extraordinary.
Manic Street Creature – Roundabout @ Summerhall ★★★★☆
Anyone who remembers the buzz around “Electrolyte”, the gig-theatre smash from 2018’s Edinburgh Fringe, will be rushing to see composer Maimuna Memon’s latest project. Fortunately, it lives up to the hype. A woman of many talents, Memon is now proving her undeniable star power in “Manic Street Creature” – not just as a composer, but as a singer, live musician and actor too.
The show centres around Ria (Memon), a Lancashire girl who’s moved to London in the hope of finding work as a musician. Once she’s got over having to pay £650 a month in rent, she finds herself falling for Daniel, a man she later learns has bipolar disorder.
At first, it’s the beautiful, haunting songs in “Manic Street Creature” that you want to talk about. They are powerful and punchy, performed by Memon and her band, one of whom plays the cello while another drums and plays bass. Memon, meanwhile, jams on the keyboard and multiple types of guitar, her fingers so feather light it’s hard to believe the mighty sound they’re conjuring.
Memon is also the lead singer of the pack. Her voice is clear when she belts, yet it’s in the inky, alto depths where you can feel Ria’s pain. She switches from spoken segments to singing with total ease, the two constantly intertwined. Ria’s monologue feels like a ticking time bomb, littered with red flags as she declares that she’s going to help Daniel, how she’s willing to shrink herself to make him happy. The audience can see it; she can’t.
In moments, the sung-through lyrics can feel a little generic in comparison with both the spoken word and the complex melodies of Memon’s work, but it’s a minor gripe. Memon is a talent with infinite promise and “Manic Street Creature” is a devastating demonstration of her ability.
Susie McCabe: Born Believer – Assembly George Square Gardens ★★★★☆
Growing up as a working-class woman in the east end of Glasgow has provided Susie McCabe with rich comic material. She grew up under Section 28, when discussing her identity as a lesbian was illegal in schools. Still, McCabe and her friends made the best of it – even if she jokes that her Brownie unit was forced to learn outdoor activity skills using disused doors as rafts.
The world of girlguiding isn’t one often mentioned in comedy, but it gives McCabe some of her funniest gags in her new show “Born Believer”. She describes how, despite none of the girls owning horses (“no one had a car or a da’”), this group earned their “pony-preparation badge” on imaginary animals. She also theorises that any kids who were group leaders, or sixers, within the Brownies grew up to become narcs. “100 per cent, Priti Patel, a sixer,” she says. I suspect she might be right.
Other strong routines come from McCabe’s position as an older member of the LGBT+ community who’s still welcomed into nightclubs with open arms. Compare that with the endlessly long, activity-stuffed hen parties her friends are holding, and she feels out of place. She tells the crowd that she “should have bought a new Fred Perry for the occasion” and we laugh, the image of McCabe on a party bus filled with penis straws innately funny.
At times, these topics can feel disparate. But within “Born Believer”, there’s still enough silliness (at one point, McCabe pretends to be a strutting pigeon) to keep the audience cackling.
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