Zara Gladman, Glasgow Comedy Festival review: 'restlessly inventive'
With her “West End Mum” Aileen, Zara Gladman has created a rounded, compelling grotesque, writes Jay Richardson
Zara Gladman Is... Aileen: Cameron’s Gap Year Fundraiser, The Rum Shack, Glasgow ★★★
Now firmly established as a live act after making her breakthrough online, Zara Gladman brings slick multimedia framing to her character and musical comedy. She remains best known for her breezily monstrous West End Glasgow mum creation Aileen, and it’s this overbearing snob and inveterate busybody who bookends her Glasgow Comedy Festival hour, deigning to set foot in the south side of the city as she tries to drum up funds for sending her precious son Cameron on his gap year.
The fundraiser itself is something of a flimsy, superfluous conceit. But it foregrounds Aileen’s exploitative tendencies under her thin veneer of self-satisfied, bourgeois gentility. Accompanied by a browbeaten Stuart Cromarty on keyboard, Aileen bends her affected pronunciation to performance poetry, shares her inventions for keeping tabs on her neighbours and maintains staunch denial about lurid videos of herself circulating online, not to mention the chaos she’s initiated immediately outside her venue.
In-between Aileen’s conducting of ceremonies, Gladman reappears as herself, strapping on a guitar to tunefully muse about her fluctuating mental health, existential wobbles and sustaining a relationship. However, her catchier songs are dedicated to an endearing hobby of her father’s and the trolls that her viral content has attracted, the international response she’s garnered contrasting with Aileen's hyper-local parochialism.
One criticism you might level is that with her mish-mash of styles and preoccupations, Gladman’s comedy lacks focus. Equally though, you could argue that the variety offers something for everyone – she’s restlessly inventive and her marriage of live performance with pre-recorded, screen-enabled content is flawlessly executed. The iconic, bulldozing Aileen tends to sweep all before her, leaving little oxygen for much else. But she’s a rounded, compelling grotesque who unquestionably deserves a broadcast vehicle beyond the smattering of opportunities that Gladman has secured for her already.
Glasgow Comedy Festival runs until 29 March, see www.glasgowcomedyfestival.com
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