Kev Orkian, The Guilty Pianist
Live Review

Anyone who watched last year's Britain's Got Talent will already be familiar with comedy pianist Orkian who reached the semi-finals. For those who didn't, you've probably still seen much of this before, since he's not the most original act at the Fringe.

His overall characterisation has more than a few nods to Omid Djalili's act and towards the end even has a dance routine that is remarkably close to Djalili's signature piece.

Orkian begins with the Les Dawson classic of playing the piano badly then moving on to Victor Borge's reading the music upside down. Both tricks are skilled stuff and if nothing else display his fine skills as a pianist. As was often noted about Dawson, it's not easy to play the piano with the occasional wrong note and make it sound just right.

Also in his favour is that he clearly has an audience, this is the kind of stuff that goes down brilliantly on cruise ships and the like. There are plenty of his crowd here in Edinburgh too. Some of the women in the room were near hysterical with laughter, you can't accuse him of not tickling his crowd.

But from a critical perspective in the main the material's borrowed and when it isn't he usually takes the easy option. His character is a hapless Armenian immigrant continually thrown out of the country and making it back in again atop the Eurostar (which it's a nice cartoonish image at least). His characterisation and humour rely on lazy stereotyping - the women in his country are hairy and ugly, pronouncing words incorrectly in an ‘amusing’ manner à la ’Allo ’Allo, and giving a gift to someone in the front row only to request money for it after they've accepted it.

Though lacking in creativity it's generally good naturedly cheeky so he gets away with a few exceptions. At one point during the musical of his life there's an emphasis on Orkian signing on that ventures uncomfortably into the realms of the Daily Mail and their love of portraying all immigrants as being dole spongers.

When compared to the many innovative talents elsewhere at the Fringe, Orkian's almost complete lack of originality stands out, but in mainstream arenas, with the following he already has and audiences that either don't care or simply like to hear the old gags, he's not going to go far wrong.