Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

In life, some consciousnesses naturally express themselves through clear metaphors while others simply don’t have the same gift. A lot of that comes down to how comfortable you are in a language, and while we can’t expect every speaker of English as a foreign tongue to be Nabokov, every so often you come across a Fringe show that reminds you of the fine line between proficiency and fluency.

Lilla Multipass is a Hungarian clown currently based in London, and Woman(33) is her one-woman show that’s certainly not as humourless as the type parodied by Liz Kingsman, but of a somewhat similar tone. 

Inside the framing of a therapy session, Multipass plays a stereotypical modern woman, striving for self-improvement in all areas, balancing life and work, in thrall to Costa, Ikea and all the other mid-range brands that allow her to approximate the life she longs for on a budget.

‘What kind of toilet paper defines me as a person?’ she asks herself, ‘Because I do give a crap!’ That’s a play on the hipster toilet paper brand Who Gives a Crap, but it’s not quite a joke in its own right, just a rephrasing of the joke already made by the company. Woman(33) is full of moments like this, where a connection has been made between ideas or phrases, but the comedic or linguistic fluency is not quite there to make a satisfying line out of it. 

Lots of non-native-speaking clowns make a feature out of this bug by foregrounding the physical or non-verbal aspects of their art, but Multipass has written herself a very wordy show tackling some big concepts, and the results are unfortunately a little mixed. 

When she spends a few minutes putting her face through an Ikea catalogue themed around the stages of grief, or gets us to play ‘rock paper scissors’ with ‘vision product hustle,’ her line of thought is admittedly a little difficult to follow.

The less heady sections of the show are a much better showcase for her talents. She’s capable of making a delightful mime of a bath with just a cardboard box and a bubble gun, and she generally radiates a fragile likability, with the huge expressive eyes that any clown would kill for. 

This is not the hour to show her at her best, but there are good moments and a good performer within.

Review date: 20 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Hoots @ Potterow