Rose Matafeo, Vittorio Angelone, Matt Forde, Marjolein Robertson - Mark Muldoon's Fringe Diary

Written by: Mark Muldoon
Published: Wednesday 21st August 2024

A pleasure to welcome Rose Matafeo back to the stage, after an explosive few years ignited by her previous live effort winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2018. Taskmaster followed, then her BBC Three romcom series Starstruck, and she's now been announced as host of Junior Taskmaster. In amongst this return, the subjects of her scorn are pleasing: big tech, Taylor Swift and her fans, Microsoft Word formatting... She's stopped using period tracking apps now, because she doesn't want tech companies knowing when she's suicidal, which gets a big laugh. It unfortunately doesn't seem to have been a particularly successful year-or-so in her personal life either... She explains that she tends to love partners a lot, but that doesn't mean she respects them. Again, big laugh.

One more highlight: Matafeo has an excellent joke that essentially states how she wishes her mother hadn't had her. It leads to the revelation that she's decided she wants her life to be childfree. She constructs the argument well for this. It crowns a show that keeps the jokes coming, the relatability high, and the mood scrapbook-y, but fun.

You may or may not have heard about the wild year Matt Forde has had, having been told he had a spine tumour just after last year's Fringe. That story is told in relatively snappy terms tonight, in amongst his usual run through the year in politics in Westminster, Holyrood and Washington. His Boris Johnson impersonation is of such high quality that it just never gets old. It's not a show that much concerns itself with fresh political insight, but you can't accuse it of skimping on the laughs.

There's an impressively all-ages audience in to hear Marjolein Robertson's stories of her Shetland upbringing. These sit amongst some properly good joke writing, with Robertson discussing, say, ABBA, or her plans for her own funeral. There's playful mischief, meanwhile, in her questioning our reasons for mistrusting Australians. The show provides a wealth of evidence that she's a highly talented storyteller. I personally would've preferred it if she hadn't swerved jokes for one (not oversized) portion of the show (in favour of instead creating Theatrical Tension), but many will be taken by it, and the central argument for women's health equality is inarguably a convincing, worthy cause.

Now established as a runaway breakthrough hit of the 2024 Fringe, Joe Kent-Walters is fantastic. It's not come as a complete surprise: he won the BBC New Comedy Award in 2023 (the final is always worth a watch if you want to see which new acts are most likely to go supernova). In this debut hour, he plays Frankie Munroe, who owns a working man's club in Rotherham that also happens to be a portal to hell. Given those circumstances, you might not expect him to start singing a song about his 'special trowel', but that's very much what he does. And the show continues in that vein. Thoroughly unpredictable, but the superb ideas just keep on coming. Some bits (the "take a little long time" song, for example) do just basically feel like filler, but you're having so much fun elsewhere that you quickly forgive it.

Interesting dynamic shift for Eric Rushton. He came to prominence with a deliberately, quite inventively slow-paced delivery style. This year not nearly so much, though that could just be because there's an awful lot of show to cram in here, as he toys with major narrative structure. The jokes are frequently phenomenal though, particularly in a roaring opening ten minutes. He's in Hive 2 this year, so be careful where you sit, lest you be caught with perhaps the least legroom of anywhere on the Fringe, but it's far from damning with faint praise to say it's well worth suffering those circumstances to see him.

Celya AB opens her show by enquiring if anybody is suffering Fringe Fatigue. "Are you tired? Well wake up fuckers!". There's a particularly fun throughline about having money and so therefore being right wing now. As we've come to expect from Celya, the quality of joke writing here is exceptional, not to mention impressively original. There's ample moments where the show folds back into itself - which Fringe shows are always trying to do - but not often as satisfyingly as here. Now performing in bigger rooms, Celya could do with always ensuring she repeats what audience members have said, so the whole room is plugged into the conversation. The show, meanwhile, ends on a positive, if slightly joke-free note. Celya is not a comedian you'd necessarily have expected to take this route. Some may prefer it to end with a comedic highlight. But that's a relatively minor quibble in a show that frequently delights.

Last time Zoë Coombs Marr performed a whole hour as just herself (rather than as her on-off alterego Dave), it gradually unfurled itself to be a high-concept show, one which ended up bagging her an online special (although admittedly, on Amazon Prime). That show first debuted in 2018, but now she's back as herself, with a show that gradually unfurls itself to be a high-concept show, this time about her attempts to track everything she's ever done. Ever. Via a spreadsheet. One truly vast spreadsheet. At points, the audience get to pick what material they want to hear from the spreadsheet, which ends up, on our night, being better than quite a bit of the material she's presumably saying every night. It's all a remarkable undertaking and the show is a success as a result, but you wonder if it could be better if Coombs Marr engineered this hour so she was just giving us the best 60 minutes of material she's got.

Is it possible that high-effort comedians like Coombs Marr are a bit annoyed by Vittorio Angelone? Across the city plenty have lavished countless hours of care and attention on crafting their Edinburgh hours. This year, Angelone hasn't. Instead, he's favouring an improvised format: the audience submit stories or thoughts into one of four categories: 'dating', 'am I the asshole?', 'filth' and 'a bit heavy'. He then riffs on them. And he's presumably taking home a comparable amount of money at the end of the month (though, possibly wisely, he doesn't push the bucket speech too hard at the end).

Well anyway, it's not fully clear why all of this admin couldn't be done pre-show, to stop it taking up time during proceedings, but that's overthinking things for a show like this. Despite it being late night on a Sunday, Angelone has the most up-for-it crowd of the Fringe so far. He's a very sharp operator, but it's fair to say the audience also pull their weight comedically here, elevating the evening further. "I hope this guy's funny" says the woman behind me, before the show starts. "He's handsome, but is he funny?". I can confirm that he is indeed both.

Read previous editions of this column (featuring Fawlty Towers: The Play, Ivo Graham, Chloe Petts, Olga Koch and Kiri Pritchard-McLean).

Mark Muldoon is also available on Instagram and Twitter. He was suffering from Fringe Fatigue, fair comment really.