Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

One of the bigger gets for the Fringe this year was the return of Sam Wills – aka The Boy With Tape On His Face, aka TapeFace – by some metrics probably the world’s most successful clown. 

Edinburgh was an early foothold in a climb that's taken him to the West End, a Las Vegas residency and the finals of America’s Got Talent, not to mention Canada’s Got Talent and a show in France which sounds suspiciously like an ersatz equivalent of France’s Got Talent. All this despite being from New Zealand! Clearly talent knows no borders.

His new show, 20, is not really new at all, more of a greatest hits package celebrating 20 years of his creation – an excuse to roll out an hour’s worth of his favourite routines. Most of them are represented by props that are pulled from cardboard boxes marked with the year of their provenance, like a fine wine. Equally in Tape Face’s case it would take a very educated palate to intuit the difference between a 2008 vintage bit and something from 2024.

If you haven’t seen him before, he traffics in silent, prop based clowning while dressed as a Tim Burton drawing and making the most out of his muscular soundboard. 

Some of it is simple mime, like the ever popular dancing-with-a-disembodied-dress bit, and some of it is more involved, like a section in which he dons a helmet with a swingball on top to knock an apple off an audience member’s head. 

All of it comes with a signature sense of playfulness that’s most reminiscent of the way Buster Keaton would eke out every possible angle of visual comedy from a ladder or a fishing rod. Although it's more Tape Face's style to proceed straight to the final iteration of an idea and then move on to the next trick.

So you’ll never be bored at one of his shows, although interestingly there’s still a sense, if not of danger, than at least that things might be comfortably hit or miss. A section requiring an impromptu striptease from an audience member (out of a supplied construction uniform – they don’t actually have to take their clothes off) falls flat this evening when it becomes clear that the participant doesn’t have the juice. 

Likewise, his rubber-pig rendition of Duelling Banjos doesn't have much to it. Most of the ideas work to some degree, though, and it’s always nice when an assemblage of lifeless props is built into a coherent vision of a horse race or a sex scene between a shoe and a sock.

The profundity of anything more than silliness itself is left to more cerebral or earthy modern clowns like Dr. Brown or Trygve Wakenshaw; Tape Face is committed to pointless playfulness for better or worse. 

It’s both his strength and his weakness that he can franchise his Vegas show out to a substitute performer when he travels the world to perform for Kings, Queens and other dignitaries. Tape Face is a medium for fun visual ideas rather than a character to connect to.

Review date: 9 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard