Edinburgh Fringe Comedy reviews: Abi Clarke | Reuben Kaye | Freya Mallard | Edy Hurst | Amelia Jane Hunter

Pleasance Courtyard (Beneath) (Venue 33)

★★★★☆

Exceptional success on TikTok has overshadowed Abi Clarke's abilities as a live performer. So she keeps the multimedia in her Fringe debut to a minimum, delivering an hour of angst-ridden but polished stand-up. An advertiser's wet dream, to judge by her reach and the products she's approached to plug, Clarke's status as a popular young “influencer” causes her disquiet. Whether it has the moral component she attributes to it is a bit of a moot point, though certainly no-one can doubt the negative discourses swirling round the internet. Sharing a name with a notorious individual among boyband fans has brought her abuse. And estate agents misinterpret how she makes a living, the truth much worse than their fears. Setting up a profile of herself as a reluctant role model, Clarke then dissects the reality, contrasting her online acclaim with the quivering, guilt-filled wreck behind her viral videos.

Cannily, she deploys a few props to help with her confessions. The main, and most effective, is a stool she reaches for whenever she suggests that she's behaved particularly badly. What starts as a rather contrived way to add emphasis to a punchline evolves as the show progresses, with the comic hesitatingly grasping towards it when she delves into a grey area, flirting with the crowd's judgement and playing with the timing of the laughs she's eliciting. Meanwhile, an audience member is asked to tally up her failings, allowing her to affect outrage or reinforce her self-abasement.

Clarke also presents a duvet that she was embarrassingly gifted, featuring 96 great feminists, a weirdly specific number that she resolves to fill to the ton, an additional perspective on her virtue. Weaving compelling observational humour out of the misogyny of America's Next Top Model, the logical inconsistencies of the Twilight saga, and the calorific content of semen, she brazenly belies her perky, selfie-ready appearance, with a bleakly hilarious musing on photos used in the media when a woman goes missing.

Jay Richardson

Until 25 August

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Reuben Kaye: Live and Intimidating

★★★★☆

Assembly George Square Gardens (Venue 3) 

Reuben Kaye comes from tough stock.  He had an aunt who was sent to Auschwitz – twice.  To hear about what happened next you’ll have to go to his show. Kaye, with his vertiginous heels, blinding layers of false eyelashes, and spectacular golden quiff, is the ultimate cabaret creature. He sings, he flirts, he flicks his microphone, which doubles as a whip.  He revels in salty, filthy, witty wordplay which elicits roars of laughter. Kaye stalks around the Spiegeltent making love to the crowd – which is a risky business in these days of negotiating consent.  He’s a master at creating an air of danger with a wink or a wiggle or a backwards glance.

It’s a big space, even for this absurdly talented triple threat. There’s a full band on stage with him for this one. But they are somewhat stranded at the rear as Kaye stalks the catwalk flickering his eyelashes and swishing his tail. This is the first time Kaye has made a show with his own compositions – and they are big, glorious, full-throated belters with absurdly clever lyrics in classic cabaret/musical theatre style. There is also a lot of tightly written, very funny chat. This Alpha Gay is particularly keen on skewering his enemies with graphic sexual putdowns.

His enemies?  Well, Kaye has experienced a very scary backlash from the Christian right in the US and Australia.  And he’s here to fight back – by recruiting a cabaret army who will support him to the hilt.

I’m not convinced he needs an army.  His appearance, his attitude and his talent is revolutionary in itself – and love, as they say, conquers all. As the show ends with a well-deserved standing ovation there’s a lot of love in the room for the truly extraordinary Reuben Kaye.

Claire Smith

Until 25 August

Freya Mallard: The Bounce Back

Pleasance Courtyard (Baby Grand) (Venue 33)

★★★☆☆

Incredibly, Freya Mallard gave birth to her first child just over a month ago but has come to Edinburgh to perform her debut hour of stand-up. That ambition is central to her desire to “bounce back” from the pregnancy. And so, with considerable caveats, Mallard is aiming to have it all, even if she emphasises how live comedy isn't a workplace set up to support a new young mother. At 25, there's an age gap of a decade between her and her comedian partner, but she's winningly dismissive of men her own age and philosophical about the limits of her bisexuality, finding women less malleable and harder to feel superior to.

Candid about some of the insecurities pushing her to have a child, but also the more appealing aspects driving her ambitions for a family, it obviously isn't a decision that she entered into lightly or made recently, and her routines remain strictly on topic, even when they entertainingly digress somewhat into the pre-eminence of babies over owning a dog. Other bits – such as mashing up her favourite reality shows – are more workaday material. And the show rather runs out of momentum towards the end. Still, she's very funny projecting the narcissism of a new parent and lording it over her childless friends as a vision of their futures.

Jay Richardson

Until 25 August

Edy Hurst’s Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Himself

Assembly George Square (Venue 8) 

★★★☆☆

Pendle Hill, neurodiversity and the Eurodance group Vengaboys all make an appearance in this witch-themed one-man voyage of discovery from Edy Hurst. Emerging from a cauldron, Hurst reveals a family connection with one of the witches tried in seventeenth century Lancashire (the contemporary account of the trial is one of his inspirations for the show). Wearing a woven pointed hat, Hurst plays games with tarot cards, books of spells and a sacred circle made of salt. He visits modern day Pendle to find clues in the witch-themed small businesses in the area.

There are a lot of lovely inventive ideas in the show, but the delivery is a bit rushed and the prop work slightly ropey.  Hurst’s extremely complex theory about a plot involving the Vengaboys is a fine example of neurodiversity in action – but in this case it is somewhat lost on the audience. It is a lot of fun though – and good to see a comic trying to mesh together stand-up, history and big ideas. My favourite bit is the film at the end, where we see Hurst dancing with his daughter in an empty village hall.

Claire Smith

Until 26 August

Amelia Jane Hunter: Exquisite Pervert

Just the Tonic at The Caves (Just Up the Stairs) (Venue 88)

★★★☆☆

A rough diamond, there's something of the gutter poet about Amelia Jane Hunter. Certainly, in the grand but precisely indeterminate age of her 50s, she's lived a life, from wrestling and riding a crocodile in her native Australia to pleasuring hairy bears in the shadowy sex dungeons of Berlin. The seamy, nocturnal underworld of the German capital is where she sets most of her hour. But it’s a blurred, lyrical vision she presents – of freedom and submission, full of writhing bodies but few discernible, distinct people.

Flitting between storytelling and grandstanding cabaret, above all else she maintains that she loves love. Lingering Catholic guilt and her rural outback upbringing can account for some of Hunter's restlessness, so too perhaps her lack of an obvious, long-term partner. But mostly she just seems joyfully sex positive, a vagabond hedonist. She's got gags, often tinged with melancholia. And she determinedly resists the description of herself as a cougar for her pursuit of younger men. Above all though, she's a character. And it's a real experience to let her self-mythologising oratory wash over you, evocative for its sinful pleasures grasped at in the dark.

Jay Richardson

Until 25 August