Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Forging an uncertain path between surrealist stand-up and agitprop, Andrew O'Neill's latest Fringe offering retains all the fire and conviction of their best shows since they became an explicitly political comic seven years ago – but their artistic intentions have become ill-focused and scattershot.

Escape promises to be sweeping in scope, recalling how the comic longed to flee the small, bland trappings of Wallington in South London. O'Neill's countercultural tendencies, as non-binary, with a love of death metal and an adherence to ritualistic magick, can be traced back to them kicking against the conformity that surrounded them growing up. In this respect, they weren't so different to their recently deceased, Irish father, a man who eschewed the working-class vocation proscribed for him to see the world. And quite a lot of other people's spouses.

There's an uncomfortable realisation for O'Neill, that their political comedy bent has coincided with geopolitical catastrophe, with a rise in fascism and collapse of the environment. But they have no truck with conspiracy theories, perceiving in them a revival of religion, a need to find malevolent intelligence and design in random occurrences. 

They're not dismissing conspiracies as a phenomenon per se, acknowledging that governments will always act in their own, naked self-interest. Yet they're unequivocal in their mockery of chem trails and 9/11 flights of fantasy, skewering the mindset that needs to escape reality to claim freedom of thought.

More so than what O'Neill defines themself in favour of, anarchy, direct political action and 'solarpunk utopia', the latter a little hazily characterised, they set themselves starkly in opposition to the ostensibly inoffensive pap of middling art, neither high or low but content to be beige, specifically the music of George Ezra and the television output of Stacey Solomon. 

The full extent of the comic’s fury towards these two figures and the violent reprisals threatened upon them are deliberately, knowingly excessive. The routines also feel designed to inject a bit of energy back into the room after the more lecturely passages of O'Neill's discourse.

I can't find too much to disagree with in their three-point schema for revolutionary change, nor the impassioned, joke-free speech they deliver forcefully identifying the rise of fascism in the UK and the nation's complicity in Middle East genocide. Nothing to laugh about there really, though O’Neill is circumspect and cunning in mentioning Palestine Action, identifying as an ally, just in a roundabout, legally canny, tricksy way.

The recurring, chanting qualities of magick that the comic evokes lend themselves to audience involvement, non-sequiturs and gags with future payoffs, the daft, left-field influences of Harry Hill and Eddie Izzard brazenly apparent, affording a bit of silliness to offset the bleak, academic and occasionally hectoring social commentary.

I just don't think O'Neill has the balance quite right in this hour. Whimsical devices like his hope for a catchphrase taking flight never solidifies into anything, feeling like a pale copy of Hill. And the theme of escape is more or less abandoned with memories of their father.

O'Neill remains a headstrong, distinct act of passion, with the observational skill of an intelligent, born outsider, happy sticking the boot in, playing with various storytelling techniques and registers, not least death metal curses on the electric guitar. Still, this is a patchy and at times discordant hour.

Review date: 23 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Cabaret Voltaire)