Rosco McClelland: Sudden Death Fringe review - 'A bemused cultural commentator with a renegade outlaw streak'

Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive) (Hive 2) (Venue 313)

★★★★☆

Rosco McClelland has long been an arresting stand-up, delivering his rascally observations in a throaty growl, with an expressive and borderline manic energy. The Glaswegian has a love-hate relationship with Scotland, suggesting that it's only the terrible weather and general miserabilism that has forged this nation's greatest achievements. And he marvels at the sheer depths of sectarianism our finest bigots can produce.

A bemused cultural commentator with a renegade, social outlaw streak that once manifested itself in his “goblin” rapaciousness for drugs, he plays up the perilousness of his stand-up vocation. He laments his lack of privilege and connections and amusingly recalls the taping of his first special, when a well-meaning but unhelpful childhood friend threatened to derail the recording.

So might he re-enter civvy street and get a regular job? For all his bluff bellicosity, that would mean revealing his true weaknesses. The comic has touched on his heart issues in a previous show. Yet here he fully outlines the impact of his Long QT Syndrome, which can cause his heart to beat arrhythmically and which, he belatedly discovered after a couple of near misses in his subsequently cloistered adolescence, is charmlessly also known as Sudden Death Syndrome.

Coming in tandem with his wife's cancer scares, it's a difficult hand he's been dealt, with several major lifestyle implications for now and the future. Still, McClelland remains philosophical. And in sharing his vulnerability, he's showcasing a more nuanced balance of light, shade and reflectiveness in his storytelling, pulling back from the blistering burnout of previous Fringe offerings, where he often only seemed to have one speed and frequently appeared to be fighting to bring the audience onboard with him. Long may he continue in this vein.

Jay Richardson

Until 25 August

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