The Last Laugh ★★★☆☆
Where: Assembly George Square Studios (Studio One)
When: 1.20pm
Dates: Aug 3-25
In a nutshell Such is the appetite for 70s TV comedy on stage – with both Fawlty Towers and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em current hot-tickets – that this affectionate fictional gathering of three bygone giants of light entertainment (Tommy Cooper, Bob Monkhouse and Eric Morecambe) will attract an audience on the strength of its re-incarnated names alone.
And it’s a testament to the talent assembled by writer-director Paul Hendy that for much of this gently stirring and nostalgically amusing hour, situated in a backstage dressing-room where the lights ominously flicker, you feel you’re in the presence of those famous primetime faces.
Bob Golding proved his credentials as Eric in the solo bio-comedy Morecambe and gives us the man anew in all his adored mannerisms (twitch-smile, hunched insouciance, and pipe-sucking mischief). Likewise, Simon Cartwright first impersonated Monkhouse in a beans-spilling monologue in 2015, and has his mask-like fixity and calculated geniality down to a tee. The unbridled delight, though, is Damian Williams whose evocation of Cooper (honed on a national tour in 2013) is gloriously uncanny – as he flashes disconcerted smiles, performs elaborate double-takes and parades a gruff puerility while waddling about in underpants and a fez.
These dead-ringers trade gags, talk shop and do more back-slapping than back-biting, while it gradually becomes clearer exactly which theatre we’re in (and when). It’s a shame the dead hand of exposition is often too heavily felt and there aren’t quite enough dramatic surprises up the show’s sleeve; still you’ll laugh, and maybe well up too. DC
Tickets: edfringe.com
Weather Girl ★★★★☆
Where: Summerhall (Cairns Lecture Theatre)
When: 1.20pm
Dates: Aug 3-25
In a nutshell Almost everything hit producer Francesca Moody presents at the Edinburgh festival is not only going to be rushed-to, but, especially when it’s a monologue, will most likely be compared to Fleabag – her break-through/ calling-card hit. Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen two years ago was a winningly funny solo centring on a garrulous, uninhibited gay stand-up’s unlikely romance with a Yank.
In Brian Watkins’s little less dazzling solo about a Californian TV “weather girl”, the laughs keep coming, and we also get a described casual sexual encounter that turns as weird as anything in the Phoebe Waller-Bridge stable. But this is a piece that pushes way past the familiar comfort-zone of a modern-day confessional and turns into a topical vision of humanity wilting amid encroaching climate change. Stacey is all sunny smiles as she tries to convey the brighter side of scorching temperatures but reporting from the arid front-line her lungs fill with wild-fire smoke and she’s slyly slurping prosecco from her water bottle to keep spirits up as well as tears (and thoughts of her crackhead mom) at bay.
Julia McDermott brilliantly gives shifting real-time facial expression to a relived succession of jolting incidents. What begins as a whip-smart evocation of typical corporate hell journeys into an apocalyptic landscape that’s at once meteorologically plausible and a manifestation of existential break-down, with the narrator serving as a keenly observant bystander to a collapse that feels at once personal and systemic.
“It’s like travelling through a world I have never been in,” she intones in wonder, as she recounts driving through engulfing flames. Tyne Rafaeli’s direction is sharp but the encircling mock TV studio gear is too cluttered by half. DC
Tickets: edfringe.com
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