Review by Paul Fleckney

Shortly before going to see Grace the Child, I bumped into a 24-year-old comic who could reasonably be described as precocious. He said he'd seen her perform, and had felt sick at how precocious she was. No one is safe from Grace the Child, and the inexorable march of time that this 12-year-old so innocently represents.

And it is impressive to watch Grace performing stand-up. The very fact she's doing it in the first place is quite something. Personally, I can barely get two words out when doing public speaking even now, let alone in Year 7.

There's also something pleasingly anarchic about the fact she is doing it as part of Bob Slayer's Heroes of the Fringe, on the top deck of a bus and wearing a magazine of bullets and beret like she's a freedom fighter demanding, I dunno, sweets or something. It wouldn't be nearly so fun if it was in the Pleasance Courtyard.

The show is pitched mainly at adults, and she has genuinely good gags, from the silly to the sophisticated, such as her one on Russia's conflicted attitude to gay rights, and her comparison of primary school to North Korea. Some of the humour comes from the transgressive jolt of hearing a 12-year-old speaking like an adult, mentioning her 'existential crisis', toy heroin needles, and saying the word 'bloody' TWICE. But sometimes she undercuts this by reminding us of her age, with some childish logic, or the sort of withering put-down that children are so good at before we grow up and turn into pussies.

She's more politically engaged than you might expect of a pre-teen, and sneaks in a sly dig at Michael Gove, and a good ironic gag about having too many exams. She winds up with a storyboard about her struggle with addiction and self-harm, to a backing of Mad World. Of course, it's not the sort of addiction and self-harm you normally hear about.

And criticism? That she should try to resist saying 'So' at the start of a new gag so much – presumably this is a nerve-settler (like the sip of lager she professes to have had), but there's nothing to lose from just launching straight into the gag. Grace already looks like she has what it takes to become a stand-up comic – just imagine what she'll be doing by the time she's 24.

• Grace's very brief run at the Fringe is now over, but you can watch a video of her in action here.

Review date: 10 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Paul Fleckney
Reviewed at: Heroes @ Bob's BlundaBus