Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Nice Try has the theatrical, carefully performed tone of the off-off-Broadway one-woman show rather than the casual conversational style of a stand-up.

Lily Blumkin starts by explaining we’re in her childhood bedroom, and she’s going through the belongings her parents want to throw out. She’s convinced that one day they will be artefacts in a future museum dedicated to her, once the world recognises her comic genius.

Each triggers a memory, for which read ‘sketch’, the first couple of which are reasonably strong. That beer-holder came from her first ‘boyfriend’ expressing love for his best mate at his bar mitzvah, but #nohomo of course. Then there’s the photo from when her dad met her first girlfriend, and couldn’t help but keep mentioning their sexuality as he clumsily tried to show he’s an ally.

Then we enter more generic territory. There’s mum’s best friend Trish, chugging back the wine at book club as she tries to forget the tearaway sons at home; the condescending Lush employee bitching about Blumkin’s skin; and the HR woman from a company she used to work for who drunkenly exposes all the sexist policies there, not in a particularly subtle or artful way, but just by stating blatant disparities.

These seem like off-the-peg archetypes rather than being too revealing about Blumkin’s real past. She hasn’t got the greatest range as an actress, either, and there’s a similarity between these alter-egos, who aren’t particularly heightened. That said ‘clump of hair stuck to a shower cubicle wall’ is definitely a character we haven’t seen before, although the scene isn’t as absurd as you might think in the way it unfolds. The inanimate object is really just a manic pixie dream girl with occasional reference to the surreal set-up.

We then come to Blumkin’s bat mitzvah, almost full circle, and a rabbi who thinks himself a comedian (he isn’t) and then Blumkin’s 12-year-old self to point out that all these people in her show were not actually so nice. This was already obvious and didn’t help a show already struggling with pace over some of the scene changes.

Blumkin’s very watchable in her awkward way, but that self-consciousness never allows the show to fly, seeming like a collection of carefully rehearsed audition pieces.

And it’s bold that one of the show’s big reveals is a disingenuity about her own marketing. ‘From the Daily Show,’ her blurb exclaims. But she’s not a writer there, just a lowly writer’s assistant, much to her own disappointment.

Review date: 22 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Patter House