Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Chapeau to Kathy Maniura for choosing Wet Leg as her walk-in music. The chorus ‘I’m a chaise longue’ is perfect for a show in which she takes various inanimate objects and personifies them. A contemporary lamp becomes a cool, aloof Scandinavian of indeterminable nationality; an Italian wine is a mafia footsoldier, a smoke alarm is constantly shrieking at the slightest provocation.

These are essentially the act-outs of a stand-up routine, but without the build-up material. They are not often not built on the most strikingly original observations – as that smoke alarm skit proves – but she has a good knack for picking the right characterisation for each item, even when it’s not so obvious.

Many sketches include endearingly corny wordplay – indeed, she admits she had to google wine-tasting terms to come up with her Chianti’s scripts – while she sees qualities in tall the items that she can translate into human characteristics.

Some genteel audience interaction breaks this up as she has us draw the next item out of a bag and afterwards declare how much we identify with her characterisations. And it enables her to philosophise: ‘And, you know, maybe we’re all full of objects…’ giving some cheese to go with that wine.

But she knows it’s corny, just as she knows exactly what this show is. Nothing hugely groundbreaking, but a bit of lightweight mid-afternoon fun. Her self-awareness adds to her considerable innate charm.

Even by her standards, however, the closing routine in which all her items – also including a smug paper straw, an over-excitable, eager-to-please electric scooter, a chair and more – find themselves in the same room, talking to each other, is contrived and goes on a bit too long. But maybe that’s just the wine talking…

Review date: 19 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot