Gig report by Steve Bennett

The revolution’s going to need a little help yet. Where once Occupy protests forced the political agenda, the current protests in Parliament Square probably won’t be costing the 1 per centers too much sleep. Last night the seditious masses amounted to about four dozen people,– even with the prospect of a free morale-boosting gig from Edinburgh Comedy Award-winner Bridget Christie.

In the event, she called off sick (or The Man had got to her). However eight other acts did turn up to provide a free morale-boosting alfresco gig, the comedians outnumbering the handful of disinterested cops turning a blind eye to the technically unlawful gathering. Three people had been arrested on Monday for putting up a tent – the criminal fiends – but there was none of the tension of previous Occupy events here.

Still, there’s something of a Dunkirk spirit about staging a show in such circumstances. The stage comprises two crates and some fairy lights, the backdrop held up by a rotating line-up of volunteers and the lighting rig a couple of bicycle lamps handed out to the audience members on the tarpaulin nearest the stage to point vaguely in the direction of the performers. Hecklers come not from the audience, but the drunk homeless guy wandering past and the quarter-hourly chimes of Big Ben.

‘This reinforces everything I’d heard about the London open mic scene,’ joked Manchester-based opening act Kiri Pritchard-McLean of the ramshackle set-up and sparse audience, echoing a suggestion that compere and organiser Liam Williams had first mooted about why comics had agreed to perform: ‘Stage time is stage time.’ Even if it’s not really a stage

His last Edinburgh show was called Capitalism, so he had plenty to say on the ways of the world that would resonate with Occupy’s sympathies. Yet only he and the passionate Ahir Shah directly talked politics. Hoorah for the Cambridge graduates addressing privilege. Shah was especially sharp on our sleepwalking into environmental catastrophe – and has a wonderful bit about the evil of patio heaters. The irony being few would have turned one down on this chilly May night.

Fair play then to Gein’s Family Gift Shop for maintaining their stage uniform of shorts and polo shirts in such unwelcoming temperatures. From thereon in, the sketch offerings got stranger – both Beard and Goose cheerily weirding out the audience, the former with uncomfortable audience interaction the latter, an energetic rant about the strange fictionalised life of David Schwimmer performed by Adam Drake.

Earlier Fern Brady offered more straightforward stand-up on the assumptions of aggression (true) and working-classness (untrue) her Scottish accent attracts, and to close the engaging Lolly Adefope adopted the never-more-apt alter-ego of her naive, studenty protestor X, full of political indignity but not all of the facts.

It wasn’t a bad gig for free, the peculiar circumstances notwithstanding, and bound by the camaraderie of protest. There are two more Live at Parliament Square gigs, at 9pm tomorrow and on Saturday, so even when capitalism remains intact after tomorrow’s vote, at least we can have a laugh…

Review date: 6 May 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett