Brighton Fringe comedy review

Abigail Rolling calls herself a shit lawyer since her clients have an unfortunate tendency to wind up in jail. But then she does represent some particularly shit criminals, too.

Case studies from her 30 years as a solicitor, currently in Barnsley, are understandably the most impactful parts of her stand-up show. Meanwhile first-hand anecdotes from the sharp end of the criminal justice system reveal just how broken it is, slashed to the bone by successive Tory governments who suspected – rightly as it tuned out – that there wouldn’t be much public backlash to spending less tax money on lawyers and criminal suspects.

But while she skilfully draws out the tragi-comic realities of her job, she’s also rather too keen to jump on the soapbox to bemoan the situation, rather than let the politics to emerge more naturally from her stories. Many times she slips into lecture mode, going into dry facts and figures and such granular details as, for example, disputing the government’s arguments that universal access to legal aid fuels demand.

Anyone in the business – and naturally there are a few lawyers in the room – or who’s read The Secret Barrister’s bestseller will already be well aware of how savage cuts to legal aid rates have decimated people’s access to vital advice at a time when they are likely to be at their most vulnerable, and left those few solicitors still taking on such work drained, disheartened and out of pocket. That said, it’s a dismal state of affairs, and Rolling is clearly passionate about highlighting it.

Digressions into the policy of hauling asylum-seekers off to Rwanda is even more tangential to her daily work – though of course it raises myriad issues of legality – with the facts known to anyone who follows the news, but she’s got a platform and she’s going to use it, regardless of whether the topic’s particularly funny.

Too often the comedy comes from sharing the facts with a sarcastic sneer or a quip that the material’s getting too dense for a comedy show. Yet she frequently also proves herself capable of a wittily pointed turn of phrase that gets to the nub of the situation.

More of these would be welcome, but more importantly she should take a leaf out of Adam Kay’s NHS diaries and put the funny first-hand stories front and centre then garnish it with politics, rather than the other way around.

Even so, her knowledge, attitude and dry wit might already be enough to make her a useful booking for topical comedy shows requiring someone to joke about news stories in the legal sphere.

Review date: 29 May 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Hove Sweet @ The Poets