'I hope I'm keeping his memory alive' - the Fringe comedians exploring their family legacies through stand-up
Comedians Milo Edwards, Kat Higgins and Gareth Gwynn have all built Fringe shows around artefacts left behind by deceased relatives. Jay Richardson finds out more
“A tall, sunburnt, unsmiling farmer”, Cyril Gwynn ploughed the Gower Peninsula in 1920s South Wales. Michael Higgins, a strapping teenager who lived in Kildare, Ireland, in the 2000s, loved rugby and was “mad into cars”. And Keith and Susan Edwards were husband and wife for nearly 40 years, frequently divided by oceans, but from their earliest courtship, passionately devoted, “just really horny”.
What connects these late, disparate individuals is that their rediscovered legacies have inspired their relatives' Edinburgh Fringe shows. May they rest in peace, but their unintended keepsakes and memento vivere have compelled anecdotal stand-up, the most in-the-moment artform.
Milo Edwards' comedy weaves “in and around” his parents' deaths, eschewing mawkishness for bleak, gallows wit. His father died from cancer just days into the comic's 2019 Fringe debut. “I went home for two days, came back, carried on," recalls Edwards. His mother succumbed to the disease a week before his 2022 follow-up. “Great comic timing,” he smiles wanly.
His last show was a departure, recalling his grandmother's working class roots. But his parents' letters, found in his “obsessive archivist” mother's wardrobe, returned him to the well. His siblings don't object. “They know what I'm like,” he says.
Spanning 1980 to 1991, the letters are from the autumnal months when his father's fashion business took him to Hong Kong. “Initially, they're overwrought, with a noticeable, regular vein of horny stuff,” Edwards discloses. “But around 1986, 1987, my mum accuses my dad of not being as romantic as he used to be. Then, in the same letter, she acknowledges receipt of a dozen red roses. And I remember thinking, 'I've gone out with my mum before …'”
There's also deeper truth to these “unfiltered” glimpses, that his parents had a very different life to the one with him in it. Fixating on the sex is awkward and inevitable, but it wasn't the most jarring. “My mother wrote things that make me think 'I don't know this woman at all’.”
He remembers her as “quite a hard-nosed operator”. Yet in her mid-twenties at the start of the letters, he says, “there's this girlish side. What's strange is feeling closer in an abstract way, knowing them better. The show feels like an objective exercise, like they're two different people. Or from an alternate reality.”
Kat Higgins is still chancing upon her brother's drawings and doodles, “in books, on calculators, on desks, it's always like finding pieces of him”. She was 12 and Michael 16 when he died in an accident at a party. Her debut, In Memory of Me, presents their sibling rivalry as enduring. She protests her Catholic mother attributing her achievements to Michael guiding the BBC New Comedy Award finalist from above.
“I can't separate who I am from the experience of losing him," she says. With three brothers, she's always been “loud and performative”, but that intensified when she began competing with his “sainted” afterlife.
"I remember thinking, 'f***ing hell, I have to crack a joke here. For a long time it felt like there was no levity in the house. Making Mum and Dad laugh felt amazing."
"You shouldn't polish someone's grit because that chips away at the memory," she says of her late brother. "I loved him, he loved me. But he turned into a monosyllabic teenager while I was still talking at the speed of light. There was conflict. Twenty years on, whenever I feel I can't remember Mike's voice, I hear him saying: 'Shut up’.”
Dyslexic, her brother struggled academically. But remembering him as a “real lad's lad” doesn't paint the full picture, because Higgins is perpetually reminded of how creative he was. “I hope I'm keeping his memory alive," she says.
Contrastingly, Gareth Gwynn never met his “terrifying” great-grandfather, who died in Australia, in 1988, when he was four. However, older relatives reassure him that his depiction of a belligerent man of the countryside, given to poetry and violence, is accurate. And that Cyril would hate Gareth, a city-dwelling, radio and television writer and presenter.
Gwynn had no ambitions to perform live after briefly dabbling in stand-up in the mid-2000s and appearing in a 2010 Fringe sketch show. But when his father died four years ago, he says his uncles guilt-tripped him into researching and reading Cyril's poetry at the Gower Festival.
Gwynn discovered this son of the soil's colourful career in the Royal and Merchant Navy where he had a long, curious association with Randolph Churchill, Winston's degenerate son. But he also discovered that the verse of “Wales' most violent farmer” was intended to be performed aloud. And, to his relief, plenty of it was funny and still elicits laughs.
Appreciating he'd inherited a compelling story, Gwynn resolved to do it justice, becoming a born-again stand-up. Re-entering the open mic circuit last summer, he found his stage persona while ostensibly distancing himself from Cyril's, even as he adopted his father's and grandfather's clothes on stage, enjoying live comedy “more in my forties than my twenties”.
Just as Cyril introduces Churchill, an incorrigible opportunist and womaniser, Edwards' Catamaran features a brash, larger-than-life supporting character in businessman Jim Lock, whose boat supplies his show's oblique title. The Edwards, like the Gwynns, were terrible with money but mixed with the flashily affluent. And as a touring act, Edwards reckons he's made a show that's ultimately “about my dad … I relate to him being away a lot, eating in restaurants alone, striving to build something.”
Similarly, Gwynn — who belatedly realised the last person to give a talk on Cyril was his father (his lecture notes full of tantalising holes) — accepts he's “accidentally written a 'Dead Dad' show”, tapping into the frustration of not asking someone something before they died. “That's the engine. My dad, granddad and great-granddad had to die to make this show possible. I have to be good enough that the audience don't dwell on that.”
Edwards couldn't do his show with his parents alive either. “The horniness would be embarrassing," he says. In memoriam though, he says their ardour acquires “an absurdist quality”.
Like most comics, he has hundreds of hours of himself digitally recorded, making his parents' analogue correspondence feel rarer, more precious.
Higgins’ brother Michael, likewise, died before smartphones were established. “In the run-up to his death, we don't have a lot of pictures together,” she laments. “If it wasn't for us rowing all the time, maybe I wouldn't hear his voice in my head.”
Milo Edwards: Catamaran, Monkey Barrel Comedy, 5.15pm, until 30 August; Kat Higgins: In Memory of Me, Nic 9, 5.10pm, until 30 August; Gareth Gwynn: Cyril, Gilded Balloon, 1pm, until 31 August
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