Review by Steve Bennett

How frustrating was this? After investing a considerable amount of time and money to come to Edinburgh, you might expect Los Angeles-based Morgan Murphy to bring out the well-honed A-game material that put her on Variety magazine’s Top Ten Comics To Watch list to make a similar impression on UK audiences.

But instead we get too much work-in-progress material about Edinburgh’s shitty venues and all-night drinking, plus British TV coverage of the Olympics, which she’s finding partisan. More distracting is the 13-year-old in the front row, who completely wrongfoots her. She can’t decide whether to do her adult material with him there or not, and spends a large chunk of the gig trying to engage him in conversation. It almost becomes a gig for that one person, not the 25 others.

She gets a couple of laughs out of her flailing banter, but she’s definitely limiting herself because of his presence. If only she’d ignore him and plough on regardless – after all, Mum was warned of the content – because the few glimpses of Morgan’s real material suggest she could be worthy of the acclaim she’s been getting. We just didn’t see anywhere near enough of it between all the diversions and the turgidly over-long, energy-sapping film set in her therapists’ office that tops and tails the show.

She is as dry as the Kalahari, speaking in a deadpan grumble about such bleak subjects as suicide attempts; the slow Stephen Wright-style delivery countered by Jim Gaffigan-style stage whispers beneath her breath. A routine about the white trash on daytime talk shows such as Jeremy Kyle is fairly routine and straightforwardly descriptive, until she pulls off a skilful, inventive pay-off; she has a beautiful line about the difference between professional comics and office wags, and her impression of the drunken harridans who litter the streets of Edinburgh, reduced to primal squawks, is brilliant.

But that’s really all we got of the good stuff, full of misery and cynicism. I’d love to see more, but in this show she was too wrapped up in her own experiences of the festival and too in thrall of the 13-year-old, to deliver more than a miserly portion of it.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

Review date: 1 Jan 2008
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett