Show Rating:

Though lesser known to English audiences, to Scots Dunbar is a star. Coming on to an introduction from Dame Shirley Bassey (perhaps), Dunbar dances on to the stage with an energy that is upheld throughout the show, and there’ll be more dancing later too.

Dunbar’s comedy immediately smacks of your funny mate down the pub, with a considerable dollop of toilet humour, too. Her material doesn’t come across as carefully crafted but is amiably chatty instead.

She regales with tales of wetting herself on stage in Australia and of her drunken mate on her 40th birthday. The descriptions are keenly observed if not riotously funny. An impersonation of a drunk is hardly groundbreaking, nevertheless her inebriated mate’s radical change in personality from affection to violence is effectively realised.

Dipping back into her past Dunbar relates her formative years in Ayr and in a series of mildly amusing anecdotes describes how she became gay because of Countdown - realising that she’d rather shag Carol than Richard. She gives voice to her biology teacher Mrs Munroe and offers a rather uncharitable description of her native Ayr and its ‘fag end beach, sewage sea and sky of misery and depression’.

One of Dunbar’s unique quirks has to be her expressive face, as she jokily notes that anyone who can’t understand her Scottish accent can at least note that, ‘Ooh, she got a very expressive, rubber-like face, like that Phil Cool.’ Then of course there are the silly dance routines that top it off.

Not massively laughworthy, but entertaining nevertheless.

Reviewed by: Marissa Burgess