Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Without telling you to disregard his Fringe debut last year, Alex Mitchell explains that its positivity was a bluff, very much an act while his world was falling apart.

He appeared to be riding high, a newish act surfing the career boost of reaching the Britain's Got Talent final. On the ITV ratings juggernaut, he'd been cast as a typical 'inspirational' story, his tic-inducing neurological condition making him a figure of sympathy, a role he was happy enough to comply with while he blew away crying choirs of children.

But he also made the mistake of being too much himself, his 'woke' queerness proving too much inclusion for some of the tabloids, setting them on a muckraking trawl through his indelicate social media posts.

Around the same time he was being monstered in the press, Mitchell was also hiding his relationship in his teaching job, notwithstanding the efforts of one precocious child to blackmail him. Throw in his processing of grief and further extreme neurological and physical diagnoses and he was having a truly tough time of it. No wonder he repeatedly declares himself punk, despite all outward evidence to the contrary. However, him just getting up on stage does feel like an act of defiance.

Lest he becomes too much of a sob story, Mitchell contrasts his problems with those of his mother and grandmother, raising children in more difficult circumstances. At just 24, he's experienced some real highs and lows and wants to keep claiming benefits. But he will childishly exploit his disability to get out of a tedious shopping trip.

The rise of the far-right as witnessed outside his school, homophobia, some of it internalised for the longest time, or just middle-class affectations, Mitchell has plenty of identity-based anecdotes and deserving targets to kick against. And he does so amusingly if unconvincingly at first through his affected punk posturing. Indeed, his outrageousness was such that it prompted a supercilious charity to write a baleful letter to him.

Still, in the coping mechanism of his rascally humour, delighting in infiltrating a hospital ward where bigotry was espoused but which he passed through undetected, Mitchell is surely stronger for laying everything bare. Beyond the sympathy he attracts but instinctively undercuts, his anger ultimately emboldens him to more savage social commentary.

Without wishing to second guess what's going on behind the scenes of this show, at the end he declares himself to be in a good place healthwise and taking a chance with a twist in his romantic fortunes.

If Mitchell is still slightly raw round the edges – perhaps not fully able to capitalise on the crap hand life that has dealt him in his storytelling – it's given him a scrambling sense of purpose that is at least a little punk, and which he'll surely refine and polish as he develops.

Review date: 21 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Underbelly Bristo Square