Review by Julia Chamberlain

Jenny Collier is using her first solo year in Edinburgh as a good comedy workout. She’s got a decent 40 minute set of stand-up for a relative newbie with various competition finals last year to her credit.

Comics always say that they feel they learn a lot just by doing a set every day for a month in Edinburgh and Collier has put the work in to get a crisp bunch of routines and knocking them out on the packed top deck of a thankfully static bus should help to make her bulletproof in terms of getting regular work.

She covers a good range of subjects, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth to get away with a smattering of sometimes coarse elements, but these are among other more rewarding tales of fertility clinics, being Welsh and particularly successfully talking about jobhunting being aided and abetted by Twitter and Facebook contributions, which had proper guffawing moments. She does some appearance-based stuff which is a bit off the mark, but her self-assurance could let her sell ice to the eskimos.

It’s a respectable short show, and a good exercise for Collier, but she would perhaps have been equally well served by scoring a 20 minute slot on one the of the umpteen bill shows that are brought up and being forced to really tighten up the set.

Not that the show was that slack, but a really concentrated 20 minutes would have been more powerfully impressive from someone who is clearly hardworking and ambitious. For the most she plays it straight as a story based stand-up, but there are a few mad moments of linguistic playfulness which are at odds with the rest of the content, these add a bit of intrigue, but they’re neither fully developed nor explained, just a bit of unexpected glitter on a solid set.

Good start, plenty of potential, concentrate on writing.

Review date: 19 Aug 2014
Reviewed by: Julia Chamberlain
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ The Free Sisters