I went to Amanda Knox's first Fringe show and here is everything that happened

In a sold-out room at Gilded Balloon’s Teviot venue, she surveys the set - designed to look like a messy family living room.

Toys are littered on the floor and a bookshelf holds a trophy, which she claims she won at high school for “the spirit of freedom”, which gains a laugh from the audience. As she talks, she is folding children’s clothes and placing them in a laundry basket.

“It looks like a crime scene in here,” she says, in the first of dozens of jokes referencing her incarceration in an Italian prison. She makes many references to the Shawshank Redemption, to jokes about her daughter hiding behind bars on the jungle gym.

In a proficient show which crossed genres between theatre and comedy, Ms Knox gets laughs: the room is supportive, with more than half of the audience giving her a standing ovation at the end. Her own trauma is evident. Yet the elephant in the room - that her situation occurred because of the brutal murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher - hangs heavy.

The name of her show, Cartwheel, a reference to the exercises she reportedly did while waiting to be questioned at the police station following her roommate’s death, is also addressed - not least in an impressive cartwheel performed across the stage, attracting applause from the audience.

“It wasn’t a cartwheel, it was the splits,” she proclaims, going on to explain that she had been doing yoga stretches while being held in the police station and a police officer had asked her to demonstrate how flexible she was.

She speaks to the recorded voice of a child, ostensibly her young daughter, who she says is named Eureka, saying she has explained her situation to her in “age appropriate” language.

To demonstrate, she takes a book from the shelf, entitled Fox and his Socks, likely a reference to her media nickname at the time of her conviction: Foxy Knoxy - and reads aloud.

“When Mama was 20, she travelled abroad, to Italy, where they all thought she was odd.

“One terrible Thursday, a monster broke in. He hurt Mama’s friend and then fled to Berlin. Mama cried help, but the cops wouldn’t listen. They slapped her around and threw her in prison.”

She refers to herself as a “weird theatre kid” and that is evident: she can act and she can sing - and she can create a well-constructed show. She can also control an audience.

She switches between the obvious, prison-related jokes to emotionally intense stories, effortlessly changing the audience’s mood.

Ms Knox laments how she “never really had an opportunity to mourn my friend”, describing Ms Kercher as a “21 year old girl who did everything right”.

She tells stories of a friendship where the pair borrowed clothes from each other and went “thrift shopping” together, and bought Meredith a silver dress to wear at a New Year party she would never attend.

“Meredith was so much more sensible than me,” she says. “After her murder, everyone was so intent on judging me.”

Near the beginning of the performance, she tells a story about a hospital visit last year, when the doctor noticed the name on her records.

“That other one ruined your name,” he tells her. At the end of the show, she returns to this idea.

“A lot of people have asked me why I haven’t changed my name,” she says. “The true answer is this. I am that ‘other one’ but I didn’t ruin my name and changing it would be like confessing to a crime I didn’t commit.”

“I think my problem was and still is, that I’m the lucky one,” she adds. “Two girls studied abroad under the same roof and only one of them survived.”