Review by Julia Chamberlain

Talk about over-promising. However, better to aim high and miss, the received wisdom is that you’ll always achieve more like that than aiming low. It is relevant to say this was seen in preview where was a massive and partisan crowd of friends, it was being filmed and the atmosphere crackled with anticipation even before the show commenced. The audience could not have been more on-side.

This was a smart show where pains had been taken with writing and construction – no lame, blow-it-together-on-the-train offering. In it, Gabriel Bisset-Smith lays bare the pain of creating a new and original show when there is nothing new under the sun.

He gave a good go to finding the Holy Grail of startling, fresh, never-before-seen comedy, by revisiting some of the oldest jokes ever, deploying audience interaction from an astonishingly up-for-it crowd, to the extent I thought they’d been primed, and dealing well with grating technical difficulties.

His initial apparent irritability and offhandedness was a bit offputting, as was the energy-generating trick of inciting a wild round of applause, but the more loopy the show became, the more I warmed to GBS; his video inserts were ingenious and an integral part of the show, without being more interesting that what was actually happening in the room.

The offstage characters of his ex-girlfriend and her bloody cheese blog (nobody would blame him for what happened to her) and his collaborator Robert Cawsey made relevant contributions. What initially seemed to be a chaotic and loose show keen to refute clichés and convention of course (cliché in itself) turns out to have a tight narrative, a resolution and romped through sketch, intentionally atrocious impressions, inappropriate dancing: nothing we’ve never seen before, which of course is the point.

It’s an enjoyable hour, rather knowing, and written with a clued-up crowd in mind. And he’ll probably be the only performer to be upstaged by Liam Neeson this Fringe.

Review date: 8 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Julia Chamberlain
Reviewed at: Underbelly Cowgate