Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

You might not know it yet, but a chaotically ambitious one-woman show about the muses of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is just the fillip you need this Fringe.

Or should I say Pre-Raphaelite Manosphere, given Bebe Cave brilliantly smashes up mid-19th-century culture with today's to show that some things just never change?

Her manic hour centres on Bertrude, the fictional sister of the real Elizabeth Siddal, the model for John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia, a depiction Cave finds problematic given that it holds the ideal female beauty standard to be thin, pale, wretched – and dead.

Bertrude works at the pub where the arty bros hang out, staging smug poetry nights with a ‘male mental health’ theme while talking themselves up as edgelord rebels for wanting things back the way they used to be. Misguided Bertrude is desperate to catch the attention of these toxic, pretentious irritants, and sit for them, and become famous.

The sort of men Cave so pointedly savages would probably decry feminists as humourless – but this is a uniquely gleeful, silly, crazy, high-energy, lo-tech centuries-spanning romp that never lets any opportunity for a joke or bit of physical or character stupidity to pass.

It starts from the very moment the tableau of Ophelia that greets us comes to life and Siddal starts complaining of her lot in a Scouse accent. Not because she’s from Liverpool, she insists, but ‘because I’m depressed.’ And don’t go thinking the voice is some ruse for Cave to show off her accent skills – they are as wobbly as the cardboard set. It’s done, like everything in this giddy, furiously paced hour, just for the LOLs.

Mad references abound – a parody of America’s Next Top Model to choose a muse makes sense, but a recreation of a 2008 Britain’s Got Talent routine seems to exist purely for Cave’s enjoyment. She’s having a whale of a time doing the whole show, and that’s as addictive as laudanum.

So much is thrown into the mix, including encounters with Alice Liddell, the young girl who rather creepily inspired Lewis Carroll, and The Bronte Sisters, blunt-talking Yorkshirewomen who sound like Sean Bean and have a vendetta against Margot Robbie for her criminal misrepresentation of the complexities of Wuthering Heights heroine Cathy Earnshaw.

The show takes in the damage caused by ubiquitous hardcore pornography this century, and the genuine misogynistic statements the PRB artists came out with in the 19th. And the questionable motivation that led the sister of Harry Potter star Jessie doing a show about a more famous sibling lauded for her long hair barely needs to be mentioned. But Bebe does, as there’s more laughs to be had there. 

Having a topic to rail against makes her myriad punchlines pointed, even if they are delivered in an infectious spirit of irreverence and high-spirited frivolity. Cave rushes around, switching in and out of cheap ‘costumes’ ( William Holman Hunt’s hat is fashioned from a Daunt bookshop tote bag, for some reason) as she battles hilariously against the weight of her own ambition. 

The result is an explosion of creativity, passion and fantastic jokes that is both cuttingly relevant and joyously daft. An absolute blast.

Review date: 10 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Dome