Brighton Fringe comedy review

Mel Byron is a gregarious, instantly likeable presence who feels at home on stage – so it comes as no surprise she has a parallel career training people on subjects such as ‘persuasive speaking and storytelling’.

But while she’s good company, her show has a fatal flaw for a comedy: very few jokes. Nor does her autobiographical story contain much in the way of twists or other dramatic moments, which exposes the limitations of her talent for being an engaging social hostess.

The backdrop to Standing at the Back is that Byron has shied away from the spotlight for most her life, but after quitting a job she hated after 20 years, she’s decided to take centre stage via the medium of stand-up.

What was holding her back, it seems after a futile digression into some sociological testing techniques, was debilitatingly low self-esteem. What could have caused this? Various factors are put forward, via a clumsy device of putting the topics on scraps of paper into a jar: the menopause, inculcated Catholic guilt, or her parents, perhaps?

She’s at her most entertaining when describing her petit-bourgeoise mother, an Irish immigrant who shunned the big cities of Liverpool and Manchester to settle in an unillustrious council estate in Rawthenstall in the 1970s – where she was obsessed with appearing posh. Meanwhile, the ten-year-old Mel was going for deeply unfashionable hairstyles and outfits.

This nostalgic segment is her strongest, yet even this doesn’t really gel into anything beyond gentle, mildly amusing, reminiscence, feeding into an overwhelming uncertainty about what this show is actually for, beyond fulfilling this new ambition to step out of the shadows.

Her confidence is testament to the fact that she needn’t have been so timid in the past, but that needs to be backed with a tighter, more purposeful script if a show is to demand an audience’s attention for an hour.

Review date: 30 May 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett