Matt Dyktynski Pole Dancer, Pleasance Beside, Edinburgh
Family baggage from Australia
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Your support makes all the difference.Like last year's Perrier winner, the American Demetri Martin, this is Australian comic Dyktynski's first Edinburgh. Also like Martin, Dyktynski is charming, good looking, slick and enjoys plenty of television exposure back home.
It is hard to imagine what is going against this man but then that is what Pole Dancer, an everyday story of family baggage, is here to tell us.
Through the comic asides Dyktynski is careful not to lose sight of his tale of the Pole, his Polish gambler father, or the Dancer, his hard-drinking, lusty Lancastrian mum. Sadly he fails to shed enough light on his family background to show how the boy Dyktynski became boy dysfunctional, if he ever did.
Yes, he did go to drama school and that is always a worry, but it does seem to have paid off, producing a polished singer/songwriter, actor and comic. But this polish is perhaps the reason why the Australian only receives polite laughter for some of his material, the delivery and content is a little too safe.
Meanwhile, the obligatory George Bush impression is definitely a work in progress although, on the same political departure, his personification of the WMD dossier is superb and one of the disarming elements of Pole Dancer. For the most part, however, audiences will struggle to find what they expected from it.
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