Review by Steve Bennett

Two years after wowing the fringe with her vagina-flashing show reclaiming the rape joke, Adrienne Truscott is wondering where to go next. She doesn't want to be pigeonholed as a 'gimmicky feminist performance artist' but aspires to be considered a respected comedian like her hero Andy Kaufman. He, too, didn't tell jokes.

However while she's trying to figure out what she's going to be she's left with a sloppy stew of weak stand-up and garbled themes.

She Starts with a scene that she assures us is ironically bad, forcing us to listen to Snow Patrol while she lies, face-down, half-naked and wearing a horse's head. Quite how much of the rest is ironically bad or just bad is a grey area, given that 'irony' is one of the ideas she grapples with, not entirely successfully.

Truscott then tells us a loose story about the time she worked in a strip club to pay her way through performance school; drops in a few knob gags, read out some trolling comments from the internet and talked about post-natal abortion as if she’s the first to think of it. Not polished nor focussed, it's open-spot stuff, really, but at pro prices. It seems her background as an avant-garde cabaret artist hasn't yet given her all the skills needed to be a more conversational stand-up, albeit one who’s conspicuously pantless.

She seemed to have ambition for big themes, but they all evaporated before making a point. Oddly too, she tried to call out flower-child festival goers as latent racists for painting their faces, appropriating Native American culture. In another story she purposely referred to her black drag queen friend, when their ethnicity was irrelevant… isn’t there some issue there, too?

Indicative of the lack of preparation were PowerPoint slides that didn't delete properly, leaving odd half-words on the screen - a small point but a sloppy one several days in to her Fringe run. And Truscott seemed to have no idea of how long she was performing. In the end she ran to 45 minutes, surprising herself how quick it was, which, given four minutes of Chasing Cars and maybe the same again of Kaufman's Mighty Mouse routine on video, doesn't leave much.

There are a couple of decent gags in this, not least a nod to a certain Tape-based Fringe favourite, just not enough. Maybe she is just trying to ape Kaufman’s anti-comedy, as some of his patience-testing stunts, which make entertaining anecdotes in retrospect must have been pretty dreadful first hand.

Whatever. Truscott is too much of a showwoman not to leave us with a big, daft finale, so at least we got a silly image to take into the night. But it was a rocky road to get there.

Review date: 11 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot