Fringe comedy reviews: Reuben Kaye: Hard to Swallow | Hudson Hughes: At Your Service | Noah Szto – Med School | Ele McKenzie: Bringing It All Back Home | Mad Ron Presents: Identity Theft

COMEDY

Reuben Kaye: Hard to Swallow ★★★★★

Palais du Variété at Assembly George Square Gardens (Venue 3) until 29 August

Reuben Kaye has it all. And he has it in spades.

This elegant, glittery cabaret monster can sing, write songs and fling around appallingly filthy repartee like there’s no tomorrow. And as he likes to remind us, there may be no tomorrow.

Kaye is absolutely at the peak of his powers. He commands the stage, swirling his trademark horse tail microphone, flicking his imperious blond quiff and clicking his sparkly heels to emphasise every point.

This is fiercely intelligent cabaret, which evokes the spirit of Weimar to create a spectacle which is personal, political, witty and wise. It’s wild, daring and uproariously funny.

Kaye’s energy is fuelled by outrage about the state of the world today. Beginning with Trump he rages against a world divided by racism, inequality and hate. This is big picture stuff – Kaye lays bare the mechanisms designed to sow division between people. And he challenges his audience to kick against the pricks.

Backed by his own brilliant live piece band, it’s a gig as much as it’s a comedy show -although all eyes are glued to our fabulous host and don’t you forget it.

Kaye doesn’t so much seduce the crowd as dominate them. By balancing the hard-hitting politics with lashings of outrageous smut he keeps the mood buoyant. Winking, fluttering the eyelashes and flashing his megawatt smile, his absurdly slutty confessional asides relieve the tension around even the darkest subject matter.

There’s a beautiful segment when he talks about encountering a Palestinian doctor in a Jewish hospital and understanding that compassion and empathy are more powerful than hate.

Despite his utter fabulousness Kaye has a humanity which shines through it all. His anti-fascist viewpoint is grounded in experience and hard facts – and the emotion is manifestly real.

Kaye is not afraid of anything. He’s not afraid of showing us the tender heart beneath his impressively muscled chest. He’s not hiding anything.

His comedy, his performance and his passion are genuinely jaw dropping. He will absolutely shock you, but he will also make you think. The standing ovation as he drops the microphone is spontaneous and utterly deserved.

Sometimes you walk out of a Fringe show and you are not the same person you were before. This is one of those shows. You are privileged to be a part of this audience. It’s cathartic. It’s transformative. It might even change the world. Claire Smith

COMEDY

Hudson Hughes: At Your Service ★★★★

Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) until 30 August

A broad satire on fading celebrity rendered through classic horror and one man's descent into Hell, At Your Service has clearly had Hudson Hughes' entire dark heart poured into it. Interspersing live action with video, elaborate props, songs and animatronics it's a knockabout, increasingly frenzied tale with numerous sound and visual cues. And in his solo Fringe debut, Hughes delivers an intense performance bordering on the zealous, rising to meet the challenge of knitting it all together.

He plays the Reverend Derek Gritt, sometime star of light entertainment religious programming on the BBC, now laid low by scandal and a vaping addiction, struggling to revive his fortunes and former glories on the internet. Despite his various disgraces and preening narcissism, the reverend retained at least one committed fan, Jane Plemley, and he's been invited back to his former parish, Godsby-upon-Treen, to conduct her funeral.

Gritt has not so much fallen from God as drunkenly careered off the devotion path with overweening self-regard and patronising contempt for the yokel parishioners sat before him. The town is a creepy place, with a history of missing children. And Jane was clearly not just a harmless old dear. Still, the vicar remains oblivious even as his potential doom draws near.

Interjections from Gritt's youthful rival as he yearns to be retained as the Church's trendy Bishop of the Internet are shot and edited with aplomb, a decent advert for Hughes' amusing online skits. And the Muppet-like imp that pops up to seduce the vicar is a tiny delight, singing in gravelly blues-jazz tones. I struggled to hear some of the reverend's early exposition over needlessly intrusive backing music. But that's a minor quibble for a production that doesn't exactly aim for nuance, subtlety or even an original plot. Instead it trusts in its creator's sprightly performance and a script littered with great jokes. Jay Richardson

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COMEDY

Noah Szto – Med School ★★★★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 30 August

Singing, dancing, playing various instruments and boyishly good-looking to boot, Noah Szto would seem ridiculously high-achieving even if he weren't a qualified doctor. Even with the caveat that he's talking about relatively well-funded Australian healthcare rather than the flatlining NHS, this is a tremendous show in the physician heal thyself genre of confessional stand-up popularised by Adam Kay, practised by the likes of Benji Waterhouse and Ed Patrick elsewhere at this festival. Fans of the US sitcom Scrubs will appreciate its silly humour about the punishing medical training experience. But with its revue-style leanings, Med School goes further to embrace the razzle-dazzle of showtunes too.

A classic second generation immigrant story of following his Chinese father into becoming a doctor, Szto achieved off the charts school marks. But he wasn't mentally robust enough to resist his apparent destiny, not when Melbourne Medical School sung him such a finger-clicking, seductive number of all the perks, prestige and financial benefits he might accrue, just so long as he set aside his concerns about long hours, stress and potentially making lethal mistakes. Satirical about a profession that appears to prepare its staff through trial by fire, stoking the hypochondriac in Szto, it really isn't a great advert for the profession, with the comic reserving his most frequent, casual swipes for the cold, clinically detached surgeons. Cheerily chronicling the often mortifying errors he made and his most soul-crushing lows, with an extended recreation of his first rectal examination, Stzo doesn't flinch from incorporating props, ventriloquism, enthusiastic gyrating and even intimate personal examination into his multifaceted, barnstorming hour. His' is not a straightforward diagnosis of burnout though, with nuance in the nimble lyrics and compromise amidst the high kicks and booty twerks. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Ele McKenzie: Bringing It All Back Home ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

A seeming pity case, still reeling from getting dumped by her boyfriend, forced to move home with her dysfunctional family, her party piece a Pikachu impression, Ele McKenzie is actually a dark horse. As she remarks at one point: “I'm a frustrating ball of contradictions.” Self-effacing but indiscreet, she blames her boyfriend leaving her on her poor fellatio but caveats with the handicap behind it, before sharing the most underwhelming sex she's had since, a fumbling encounter she couldn't summon the will to rescue. Explicit in her desires, she's nevertheless failing to satisfy them. The love-hate relationships she has with her mother and more conventionally successful twin brother seem hyperbolically exaggerated, her return to her childhood home encouraging stroppy teenage regression. Still, hers' appears a small life of quietly raging desperation, the frustrations of a single woman trying to plot a career in a comedy industry geared towards men. That is until, inspired by Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic father-son saga The Road, she dreams of better connecting with her equally eccentric dad. The final section of the show is given over to a very funny fantasy in which she introduces her parents to the pensionable music icon she's dating, the age gap no obstacle to the lusty physical relationship they're enjoying. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Mad Ron Presents: Identity Theft ★★★

Three Sisters (Venue 272) until 30 August

Uxbridge's third hardest man is back, this time with a suitably dodgy gameshow. Along with two ex-cellmates, some eye wateringly punny ideas for competition rounds, £1.74 in prize money and so much more flesh on show than is entirely advisable at this time of night, Mad Ron is the still, mainly silent centre of an hour of what might be termed mayhem, were it not that mayhem is usually more organised than this. The hapless participants in the game show were all probably in the grip of PTSD afterwards, but the charming Italian (bless him !) in front of me made not a bad job of the soundtrack to The Human Centipede. The show is much of what you hope for in a late night bit of fun at the Fringe. It is loud and looser than a half pint of cockles in a pint bag, but every so often there is a moment, an actual joke, a game of Play Your Cards to the Far Right which the entire audience join in enthusiastically, and quite a lot of fun with a reincarnated Bernard Manning, who is now black. Kate Copstick

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