Ania Magliano: Forgive Me, Father review – winning comedy about commitment and a lost coil

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The standup delivers bullet-proof set-pieces in a masterclass on threading emotional significance through joyful autobiography

Last year, a late reveal recast Ania Magliano’s lighthearted comedy set as something more meaningful entirely. There’s nothing quite so eye-catching this year, but Forgive Me, Father is another masterclass in threading emotional significance through otherwise weightless and joyful autobiographical standup. It finds the 26-year-old teetering on the edge of romantic commitment: now cohabiting, and ostensibly very happy, with a boyfriend who has form for long-termism – and yet prone to starting arguments that erode the relationship’s likely longevity.

Why? To discover, we must revisit Magliano’s infancy as the child of divorce, and her several recent trips to the doctor to hunt down her lost contraceptive coil. Intrusive medical procedures have long provided standups with crowd-pleasing material, and that’s the case again here. But it doesn’t feel as cheap in Magliano’s hands as it can elsewhere, because it’s well woven into the tale of her commitment-phobia. Nor is it the show’s biggest-hitting sequence. That would be a set-piece about “the world’s most powerful vibrator”, which our host must connect (droll image, this) via extension cable and whose awesome powers extend not just to satisfying the sex drive but, on this evidence, the funny bone too.

At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/gxy7AjH

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two years after Buffalo mass shooting, an art exhibit focuses on the victims

A few months after 14 May 2022, a curator sought out three local artists. The resulting exhibition, Before and After Again, is thought to be the first of its kind Two years ago, a white supremacist drove 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, and opened fire in a grocery store in the city’s predominantly Black East Side neighborhood, killing 10 people and injuring three. Though the Tops Friendly Markets where the racist mass shooting took place has been remodeled, and most of the country has forgotten about the violence that occurred on 14 May 2022, Buffalo’s East Side is forever changed. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mqu1LFv
Read more

£1 Thursdays review – nightclubbing, sex talk and big decisions

Finborough theatre, London A mix of sweet observations about female friendship and cheeky brazenness about sex, Kat Rose-Martin’s play finds two young women at a crossroads in their lives In the cold air outside a sticky nightclub in Bradford, 17-year-olds Stacey and Jen are at a crossroads. In one direction lies the world they know: the family stress, the looming exams, the pumping pop beats at the club where they’ll reliably pull boys from school. In the other direction lies an uncertain path, and questions of who they are apart from one another, whether they could be the first in their families to go to university, and how to afford it if they do. Constantly on their minds, while they’re drunkenly dancing the nights away, is where they’ll end up, and what to do if they are the ones left behind. Thoughtful if not revelatory, £1 Thursdays covers an uneasy period of big decisions in these characters’ lives, as the gap between them widens. Monique Ashe-Palmer (Six) is ebullient as St
Read more