Sara Pascoe vs Her Ego, Pleasance Courtyard

Julian Hall
Monday 09 August 2010 19:00 EDT
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With such an edgy persona as Sara Pascoe's, it could go either way, as with the Marmite test that she references in her show.

"Unsettled but beguiled" might sum up the state of her audience as they witness a neurotic, eccentric brainiac trying to keep it together, fooling us that her shtick might fall apart at any moment and make a whimsical wander up a comedy cul-de-sac.

While there are some meanderings, this startled deer of a performer, who mixes the free-range and the battery eggs in supermarkets, has love affairs with dead philosophers and took four weeks temping as the Home Secretary to give Theresa May "time off to be more attractive", pretty much keeps a tight rein on her kooky alter ego. You might call her Josie Long with an edge.

With a magpie's eye for subverting and inverting words and concepts (praying, she says, is "ordering what you want from the cosmos", as if it were Argos), Pascoe leads us a merry dance around the scrapbook of her mind while being careful not to tug on tenuousness for too long.

Along the way, she shows us flashes of her musical comedy ability, including her Lady Gaga-inspired composition "Just Read". You feel that this fragmented genius of the 'zine generation could turn her hand to anything. A show that is always clever and sometimes exquisite.

To 30 August (not 16) (0131 556 6550)

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