Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Em Stroud is a likeable, chuckling cove, a 'slightly overweight, perimenopausal woman' with a resurgent zest for her life and a mantra: 'Lose control to be a better soul'.

Part autobiographical introduction, part self-help lecture, Navigating Life chronicles the moments when she pushed herself out of her comfort zone and was able to find happiness and growth.

With a peppy, ebullient energy and sing-song delivery that belies her 47 years, she's warm and affable, even if her efforts at crowd interaction are of the gently chiding, nursery assistant school of engagement.

She rather skates through her account of her 20s. Yet she establishes the key markers that she chose drama school over selling property, women over the men who proposed to her – a chapter that unquestionably needs teasing out further, even if her current appearance renders it one of the least surprising disclosures in the show – and that she assumed she would never be a mother.

Contrasting those big personal moments, her first real anecdote, of going to a silent wellness retreat in her 30s falls prey to the inertia that she encountered there, with neither the agonies of extended stillness or the homicidal fantasies she indulged in of murdering the serene woman in front of her elevating the tale beyond amusing dinner party chit-chat.

Stroud is no bore, asking the audience to suggest what prompts them to murderous thoughts. But she has little nose for the manipulation of narrative tension. And her internal murder plot simply dissolves when she finally converses with her quarry.

Similarly, she rather fumbles the revelation of her being a parent with too much ironic signposting beforehand. There's a bit of grit in her coming-out story, with the shadow of a stepfather questioning why she didn't wear dresses. But again, it's rather superficially raced past, perhaps trauma that's she not quite willing to explore more deeply yet.

Stroud's account of her artificial insemination is barely less clinical than the procedure, with precious little sketching of the gay friend who supplied the sperm, nor the son it produced. And she ends with a sort of ‘tch, can you believe he's 14 and taller than me now’? Well no, not really, because I know literally nothing else about him.

It won't surprise you to learn that Stroud's current partner is also just as indistinctly portrayed, which might be OK, except that she's the reason for the performer to tentatively embrace motorbiking, puffing up with pride at becoming part of Dykes On Bikes. A sub-culture worth explaining and espousing to the wider public you might imagine? Alas, not.

With a toy hatchet for murder and space hoppers for audience volunteers to play the role of sperm in a needless theatrical act-out following the insemination saga, Stroud has a notion of stagecraft. 

But this hour feels like you've spent ten minutes reading a gently amusing profile of an inspirational 'character' in a magazine, leaving you wondering where the other 50 went.

Review date: 8 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: C ARTS | C venues | C alto,