Will Adamsdale: Facetime

Hh

VENUE: Underbelly, Bristo Square

TIME: 6pm – 7pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, not 14

TICKETS: £11 – £12

Will Adamsdale’s winning of the Perrier in 2004 lurks in the background of this show in more ways than one. It’s the tale of a middle-aged man aware that perhaps his biggest successes are in the past, and he repeatedly points towards that victory as something haunting him. But it lurks too because this show doesn’t manage to hit those heights from over a decade ago, meaning for the audience too there’s a hunger for what once was.

Adamsdale trades on his middle-class, white, privileged background, and notes that he has no right to complain. But that privilege too irks him, for it

Julia Rorke: Jeneane’s Kinky Room of Astrology and Ciggies

Hh

VENUE: Underbelly, Cowgate

TIME: 11pm – 12am, 1–24 Aug, not 13

TICKETS: £10 – £11

Halfway through the Fringe, and Julia Rorke seems fairly acclimatised to people wandering off halfway through her show.

One particular section is clearly a tipping point—a quasi-karaoke means he should be more of a success. All this circles around his relationships with his children, and he thoughtfully and acutely mines the unthinking cruelties that offspring often inflict upon their parents. He critiques his own masculinity, especially when he compares his lack of practical skills to the Polish builder seemingly forever in his house. It’s well-mined comic material, and it’s frustrating because it always feels as if Adamsdale is about to take it somewhere fresh and thoughtful, but it never alights on something singular.

He’s in a big venue, and it seems his brand of smallscale introspection needs to be somewhere smaller, more focussed, more intimate. The halting uncertainties of his comic voice means he remains intriguing even if the material lacks force. There persists a sense of a yearning for whatcould-be for both performer and audience. ✏︎

Brett Mills

session—and it’s interesting watching one front-row couple finally decide "it’s 11.30pm, let’s catch that last bus, because we have absolutely no idea what is going on here." Or thoughts to that effect. Rorke waves them off cheerily.

Not that anyone else is entirely sure what’s happening either, but the problem with leaving early is that you will never find out what Rorke does next, and what she does is often fascinating. Resplendent in sports-bra, bright green strides and matching cape, the Aussie absurdist really is having a red-hot go at capturing that elusive Fringe spirit.

Ostensibly, this show is about a character called Jeneane Morris doing people’s horoscopes, which is quite a promising premise. But she only gets an hour to express herself each day, so after an intriguing recorded intro about Julia/Jeneane’s childhood, she lets rip. For a while, it’s pretty darn entertaining, a jade flash of energetic emoting. But then Rorke drifts.

While her sheer chutzpah had previously held the attention, the second half is a hot mess. There’s an awful lot of frenetic astrological gabbling. Perhaps punchlines are more apparent on better days, but tonight it feels like a Russell Grant cheese-before-bedtime fever dream that we are somehow trapped in.

✏︎ Si Hawkins

BBC: BritishBorn Chinese

VENUE: Laughing Horse @ City Cafe

TIME: 11:15pm – 12:15am, 1–25 Aug, not 12

TICKETS: FREE

Boycotted: Comedy from Israel H

VENUE: Champions of Festival @ The Scotsman

TIME: 12:40pm – 1:40pm, various dates between 2 Aug and 26 Aug

TICKETS: £7.50

A showcase of Israeli standups that largely eschews Middle Eastern politics, this is nevertheless an offensively bad show. “Boycotted” suggests that it merits sufficient interest to be suppressed, when it doesn’t come close to warranting such attention.

If you’re thinking of going to see this debut hour from Matthew Fong, be aware that the venue is a karaoke booth with barely the capacity to comfortably hold an audience in double figures. In the best case scenario, you will be turned away from the show – a woman in tonight’s audience has made three prior attempts. In the worst case scenario, you will be forced to watch an awkward standup set at microscopic close range, a claustrophobic nightmare in which the performer can read the expressions on our faces at all times.

Though he maintains that prior performances have been rapturously received, tonight we seem to laugh out of politeness more than anything else. Fong has the stage presence and confidence to ably deliver a full length show, but lacks the inspiration to surprise or excite us. After riffing on the cultural stereotypes promised by his show’s title, he can offer only tedious innuendo.

At one very low point he tells us about a chain of shops found in Hong Kong named Wang King, and claims that an unopened branch bore the legend "coming soon". I mean, really.

Fong then closes his set by telling us that he and his fiancée no longer have as much sex as they once did, a piece of information which is accompanied by a song exhorting her to shoot a pornographic movie with him. Good stuff. ✏︎ Lewis Porteous

Opening, Arab Jew Ofir Kariyo is just off reserve duty in Israel’s armed forces where his Turkish-Yemeni heritage set him apart from his fellow conscripts. But it inspires only the broadest, clumsiest strokes of comedy about prejudice against the swarthier gentleman – prejudice which he promotes himself with a dreadful routine about his body hair. Condescending to both the Scots and the English in the room, trading in the hoariest stereotypes, he at least acknowledges the fraught situation in Israel with a few weak gags. And he tries to gee the crowd into enthusiasm.

By contrast, self-styled “Jerusalem nerd” Gil Rosenberg speaks a strangled form of English and cuts a pitiful figure, declaring that he’s not a standup then emphatically proving it. Offering a deliberately terrible song on recorder and triangle, he recounts with zero irony how he tried to chat up a pretty woman by chatting to her “ugly” friend and seems genuinely surprised by his rejection. Inevitable walkouts.

Closing, American immigrant David Kilimnick speaks fondly of his adopted home and the freedom it affords him to be Jewish. But although he built a reasonably amusing head of steam towards the end by emphasising emotive Israeli greetings, he began with belligerence towards the unresponsive crowd and allowed this bitterness to colour every routine. ✏︎ Jay Richardson