Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Elouise Eftos: Australia's First Attractive Comedian | SMUT with Entendre Entendre | Marjolein Robertson: Lein | Hannah Campbell – Me! | Killian Sundermann: This Boy is Cracking Up

Elouise Eftos: Australia's First Attractive Comedian

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 24 August

★★★★☆

Let's be honest, self-deprecation, openly appealing for audiences to like you and never running down your peers are such established features of contemporary stand up that they're essentially invisible. So when an act seems to flagrantly and fragrantly subvert them, it's bound to cause a bit of a stir. With her retro pin-up artwork and a little red dress, Elouise Eftos is un apologetically sexy and super-confident, flirting with the audience as a performer while never letting the imagine for a second that she might deign to be with them in real life.

That the upfront Greek-Australian has the physical and comedic goods to back up her poise and assurance is confirmed right from the get-go. And she benefited on the night I caught her from her typical audience of “girls and gays” being supplemented by a front row of heterosexual lads, scarcely knowing what had hit them – even as they slavered like wolves in a Tex Avery cartoon, Eftos's mastery of the classic animation's sound effects being just one of her more hidden talents.

Although her throwback posing has upset some of her female comedy icons, with irony the first casualty in the battle of the sexes, Eftos is also embracing the dubious future of dating in the AI age. Set up like a computer game, she challenges her marks to seduce her against the clock as she inhabits various fantasy archetypes, the beach babe, the bartender, the bookworm etc. Plenty of knockabout fun, if perhaps excruciating for those brought to the stage, and it allows her to comment on contemporary sexuality, manipulation of the spectator's gaze and the requesting and receiving of consent. Eft os leaves some things to the imagination, but not too much, in her eye-catching finale. Yet she doesn't indulge easy answers about how free female comics are to be themselves in this bravura performance.

JAY RICHARDSON

COMEDY

SMUT with Entendre Entendre

Zoo Playground (Venue 186) until 24 August

★★★★☆

The word brave is too often used in a patronising way. That is not how I use it here. This extraordinary show is very brave. To play with character comedy, add in quite the dollop of semi-graphic sexual content, then pull it back to beautiful and poignant storytelling while increasingly scantily clad is impressive.

There is no section in the Fringe brochure for a show like this. Bryn Woznicki (and her alter ego Entendre Entendre) manages to be funny, very rude, genuinely moving and memorably powerful all at once. Her timing is breathtakingly good and her stage presence like a very beautifully coiffed and maquillaged tractor beam by which we are all held fast for her hour. And we love it.

Smut is the title of Entendre Entendre's memoir and we are treated to sex-saturated (hence her HPV2 and immunity to Penicillin) excerpts therefrom, with tales of post-coital chopped cheese in New York and titles like “Garlic Pussy”. The Lie of the Big Cock takes a pasting (and in song!) and we do generally get the idea that she has – as the tells us at the start – “f***ed a lot”.

We get haikus about drummers making the best lovers and play “Never Have I Ever”. Then, towards the end of the show, things take a poignant, serious turn. Entendre Entendre plays with comedy's most dangerous weapons – sadness and silence – and it is breathtaking. From a saucy seductress who so recently has had her room rocking with laughter at some sexy role-play with a random – but enthusiastic - audience, she becomes vulnerable, regretful and sad. It is extraordinarily moving. And then, in an instant, we are laughing again. As a script and as a show concept, this is good. As a performer, she is great.

KATE COPSTICK

COMEDY

Marjolein Robertson: Lein

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 24 August

★★★☆☆

Marjolein Robertson has made a trilogy of shows with titles based around her name. So there was Marj, then O and now finally Lein. She came of age in comedy at a time when mining personal trauma was the fashion, and Marjolein (you pronounce it “Marie-O-Laine”) made her shows personal, honest and based on the deepest darkest parts of her experience.

But she went too far, which is partly what this show is about. In the final part of her trilogy Marjolein, (her name is Dutch), gives us her comedy origin story – how a disastrous episode in Amsterdam led her to take a course in stand up. The comic, who grew up in Shetland, incorporates traditional folk tales into her shows. Marjolein weaves in her dislike of jazz, her failure as a mime and her distrust of the French. Her story features nuns, angels and magic cheese. She has a charm and an eccentricity which is hugely appealing and properly funny.

There are lots of brilliant elements, which she doesn’t quite draw into a satisfying whole. But I’m still keen to see what she does next. In the words of Quentin Crisp: “Age is kind to the non-conformist.”

CLAIRE SMITH

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COMEDY

Hannah Campbell – Me!

Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 24) until 25 August

★★★☆☆

Hannah Campbell's not got many grand aspirations for her hour, with a straightforwardly solipsistic admission that she will be its primary focus, there will be nothing “too deep” and the promise of three “risque” jokes. The disclaimer betrays her lack of confidence in the latter, because there's nothing in the Edinburgh resident's set that could truly shock or offend, with even a closing abortion gag operating within reasonably safe and contained parameters.

Her simmering resentment at boorish misogyny she's encountered affords her some appealing spikiness. Yet her pique with millennials and their so-called problems at the grand old age of 32, feels premature, scolding and excessively affected. Prone to hoary stand-up cliches, like Glaswegians being unfamiliar with fruit and punchlines about being fingered in an unappealing location, her cynicism also feels rather too default and protective a mechanism.

Tales of the nine years she spent in New Zealand are amusing enough in their culture clash, even if she can't fully deliver on her salacious pledge about going on Kiwi television that she sells it with. Still, she ekes the story out capably and ultimately keeps the crowd invested in her grouchy self-analysis.

JAY RICHARDSON

COMEDY

Killian Sundermann: This Boy is Cracking Up

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 21 August

★★★☆☆

Killian Sundermann eventually found himself online, creating funny viral videos about his Irish-German heritage. Yet the waggish 30-something shows that he can more than cut it live in his debut Fringe hour. Having recalibrated his rockstar dreams of following in Phil Lynott's tight trousers, after realising that his privileged upbringing afforded him considerably less grit and gypsy soul to work with than the Thin Lizzy frontman, he's nevertheless been a drifter and retained his guitar.

Born in England, growing up in one of the posher parts of south Dublin, and with family who arrived in South America via 1940s Germany if you catch his drift, he's learned to dial up and down aspects of his identity depending on the circumstances. That's a luxury which can't be afforded to his explicitly Celtic mother and Teutonic father though, with the latter's quest for inclusion in his adopted home the show's strongest throughline.

With chortling good humour, dishing out to all-comers but invariably making himself the principal butt of the joke, Sundermann recounts his ill-advised time spent living in a van with his girlfriend, with their fellow Europeans slow to indulge them as they strained their relationship and his spine. The songs are only gentle accompaniment to Sundermann's amiable anecdotes, leaving Lynott to continue resting easy for now.

JAY RICHARDSON

READ MORE: My Festival: Marjolein Robertson