Review by Steve Bennett

You have to feel a little sorry for Lizzy Mace, performing the first night of her Fringe run in a not-quite-finished venue with such hugely intrusive noise bleed from outside. But you also have to feel a little sorry for her audience, too, enduring an anaemic hour of character comedy.

Her creations are all awkward, shy people overlooked by the rest of the world. Which also means they don’t have a lot of charisma to engage with. Nor, save for a few notable exceptions, do they have much in the way of jokes, so this is a succession of largely uncomfortable people complaining meekly about their lot. It’s mildly sad, more than funny.

The tone is set with the apologetic ‘stage manager’ who greets the audience with an introduction griping about Mace’s lack of manners and talents. Self-deprecation’s one thing, but only if you can own it. Instead, this genuinely sets expectations low, a promise that’s subsequently delivered upon.

‘It is acknowledged truth universally acknowledged…’ opens the first scene, acknowledging Jane Austen’s famous opening line. However, this character is actually supposed to be Emily Bronte’s ghostwriter, which just seems like sloppiness from the off. If the mix-up is a joke, no reference is made to it.

This character, with clumsy malapropisms –  ‘speacher’ instead of ‘speaker’ for example – delivers what amounts to dubious observational stand-up about why a Scotch Egg is covered in breadcrumbs but Scotch Tape isn’t. But she does so in a bonnet, as a ‘character’, as if that excuses the weak material.

Then here’s the lonely soul on the internet dating site, the equally lonely soul reduced to coat-carrier for her outgoing mates on a big night out, and an actual wallflower, who does at least indulge in some wordplay about her floral lot that provides some real jokes. But it comes directly after another scene riddled with deliberately bad puns, so the tolerance for this sort of comedy is greatly reduced.

A stronger idea is characters forgotten from nursery stories as they didn’t fit the convenient ‘rule of three’. So we meet the fourth bear from Goldilocks and the fourth little piggy who built an even more robust dwelling. But although these are promising premises, the subsequent scripts just don’t have enough jokes in them, as if the idea alone is enough. That criticism is true of the whole hour.

Mace is a reasonably versatile actor, inhabiting these underwritten characters convincingly. But they have no subtext, few quirks, and scarcely any gags, leaving them not nearly interesting nor funny enough for us want to spend much time with them.

Review date: 3 Aug 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: PBH Free Fringe @ Bar Bados