Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

The ages of woman and the red flags they ignore are cleverly reflected in Maria Ansdell’s debut show, a beautifully-performed one-woman cabaret about love in which Ansdell plays herself as ringmaster as well as all of her cringey exes, on stage together for one night only.

Our guide to this experience is the earnest French cabaret queen Razmatastique, a die-hard romantic emerging gracefully from behind a heart-shaped screen tastefully appointed in pink velvet, and wearing a kind of cabaret spin on a North American pilgrim’s outfit. 

This get-up proves to be carefully chosen, and weirdly adaptable for the ex-boyfriend characters that follow, which include a seven-year-old kid obsessed with pirates, a GCSE-aged white boy getting into hip-hop, and a grizzled cowpoke.

What slowly dawns on you through the character sketches and linking segments is just how much of a consummate entertainer Ansdell is. The laughs come at a relatively moderate pace, but there’s a level of technical proficiency to be seen here that’s usually only associated with actors in musicals. 

All of Ansdell’s many voices are remarkably consistent, and there’s no sense of sweatiness or chaos to the smooth changeovers and audience interactions. Most impressive of all are her physical movements while in character as Razmatastique. The expressions and flourishes of cabaret that she brings to that performance are graceful and precise to a hypnotic extent, and contribute to an immense sense of security in her hands, even during sections without many gags.

The ex-boyfriends are brought to life with equal confidence, although in a perfect world they might each have been developed a little more. Lazarus, for example, is a lovely evocation of the kind of snobby, floppy-haired intellectual elitist that many people meet on an English Lit degree, but that’s really where his character begins and ends. A Demetriou or a Cockayne might have found a couple of other weird sympathetic traits to really make him stick in the mind. 

It’s also just as well that the room is full tonight, because she burns through audience participants at a rate of knots, drafting people almost constantly into positions as damsels, wooden planks, hype men and various other ancillary characters and objects. 

Picking one person and crafting a deeper, two-way relationship with them throughout the show might yield greater dividends. So there’s a slight sense that Ansdell is just beginning to play around in a sandbox of this size, but her confidence and technical skill make her a performer to watch regardless.

Review date: 9 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Hoots @ Nicolson Square