Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

If any character comedy show was calling out for a sequel, it probably wasn’t 2023’s Clementine, which was a Fringe smash and a great show, but really accomplished everything it needed to within its initial hour. 

If memory serves, when we left her, Rosalie Minnitt’s Regency-era spoof character had realised she didn’t need no man and had self-actualised, a development which is wisely not rolled back here.

So what do you do with this type of character when romance is no longer on the table? Well, Minnitt has essentially inserted her into Les Miserables, as Clementine takes a journey to the big city and accidentally foments revolution via a feud with her erstwhile friend Satsuma.

Minnitt’s energy for the performance remains exceptionally high, and carries the day for this show, which is as silly as before but definitely less focused. As a character, Clementine’s toxic girliness was designed as a response to the romance novels of Austen, so she loses a lot of her specificity when you pluck her from that context and have her doing the little mouse in the big city routine.

Along the way we get a lot of single-scene interruptions from new characters, such as a strange bird woman and a Cockney street urchin, most of whom stick around for five minutes before disappearing from the story, leaving the narrative thrust to feel a bit stop-starty. Bringing in some new characters to take the load of Clementine is a good idea, even if none of them have her comedic staying power.

As Jay Richardson wrote in his Chortle review for the original show, ‘the laughs escalate as its adherence to the source material disintegrates.’ That was true of the first show, but here we begin the show at maximum disintegration – Clementine 2 is so full of intentional anachronisms and contrasting comedic digressions that it all starts feeling a little hazy, like the point of the character has been lost somewhere along the way.

Minnitt remains totally in command of the room, and the wiz-bang quality of her imagination throws out so many jokes per minute that many of them stick. The general effect is still very fun, but returning Clementine fans will definitely notice a mild case of sequelitis.

Review date: 26 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard