Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Lady Of The Lakes is a retelling of the King Arthur myth through character comedy, with Em Humble focussing on less well-known figures, such as the mysterious Future Teller, Sir Galahad’s horse, and a jobsworth from the Lake Maintenance Department. 

An early scene introduces The Hand Of The King, a knight who rallies the troops with all the stirring passion of an ineffectual line manager, while insisting pay and conditions are wretched because the king needs all the gold for his crown. #satire.

There’s a character that is definitely not Gollum, if anyone from the Warner Bros legal team is reading, and an orphaned Cockney urchin who seems to have fallen, anachronistically, out of Dickens. Even The Hand Of The King is from the George R. R. Martin books, not Le Morte d’Arthur.

So, yes, it transpires that Humble hasn’t done the reading and is pretty much busking it, to the chagrin of the all-knowing talking book who takes her to task about significant departures from the source material. 

No wonder the comedian performs it all with a glint in her eye that says ‘I can’t believe I’m getting away with this nonsense’. How clunky is the plot? Let’s just say the phrase: ‘We’re going to have a talent show to put the water back into the lake’ appears at one point.

For the show is really about Humble’s propensity for procrastination, easily distracted by displacement activities that take her away from the job in hand. One rabbit hole led to an amusing running joke about how oddly dogs were depicted in medieval art. A quickie about a rat who can play the recorder is more of a random throwaway.

Humble gets ahead of any criticism that Lady Of The Lakes’s disjointed nature and slightly uncommitted execution mean it doesn’t quite come off – although her explicit acknowledgement doesn’t negate the charges.

Yet her winsome, self-aware performance is fully engaging – especially when she breaks character – while the craft that goes into details, not least the delightful crayoned animations covering scene changes, helps create a winning comedy world. She proves you don’t need to be Merlin to cast a spell.

Review date: 15 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard