Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Anna Leong Brophy comes out of the traps swinging, with an impassioned, savvy satire on how poorly female characters are served by Hollywood. But Born Sexy Yesterday is a diatribe of two halves, with a massive mid-show slump from which it never quite recovers.

Her prime target is the trope in which attractive yet childishly naive women awake in new worlds, reliant upon men to guide them through their unfamiliar surroundings. The Fifth Element is the prime example, but once identified you can spot it everywhere: Splash, Mannequin, and pretty much every episode of Star Trek to name but three.

Brophy embodies this archetype by emerging from a bin-bag amniotic sac and imprinting on the first man she sees in the audience, getting him to teach her the ways of the world and quickly falling in love. ‘You so wise,’ she coos adoringly. 

Beautifully played out, the scenes systematically expose every problematic aspect of this dynamic, from a man being infatuated by someone with the mind of a baby and the body of a woman, to the very imbalanced power dynamic.

But Brophy’s alter-ego gets wise to what’s going on and after trying on a number of Tinseltown’s very limited range of permitted female characters – manic pixie dream girl, shrewish wife, ditzy babe and femme fatale – finally discovers her own agency.

Here Brophy – making her solo debut away from the Egg double-act she performs with Emily Lloyd-Saini – breaks away from the character that has so far made the case so compellingly, and the show’s spell is broken.

There follows an audience guessing game to identify IMDB’s top five films – and no surprise that they are all male-centric to the virtual exclusion of women. You have to go a long way down the website’s full list to get a decent female character at all, though the discussion here is more like a media lesson than a comedy show.

Then comes a new act-out, again involving audience participation, showing how male characters can be deeply flawed fuck-ups and still portrayed as heroic, in some way – a latitude rarely afforded to women. Yet this is over-long and under-funny, including an audio mash-up of lines making – labouring – the point. It’s such a contrast with the deft, spirited stridency of the initial character.

Finally, Brophy finds an archetype she can live with: the crone, identified by her wisdom and entire disregard for appeasing the male gaze. Again, she lays it on a bit thick, though a delightfully silly way of portraying her great-grandmother, purportedly a jaguar-hunter in the jungles of Borneo, ensures the hour ends on a high.

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