Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Ania Magliano realised she was bisexual only after she had started stand-up, so her coming-out story is an obvious focus for her Fringe introduction. Although it is perhaps not the big reveal she once anticipated, the comic is drolly funny about a journey of discovery that's ongoing.

Conversationally confident, candid and with a nice line in staying sexually active and open into the retirement home, Magliano is, however, no erotic pioneer. She inadvertently plagiarises the defining moment in her life and struggles to discern the differences between dating men and women, beyond a belated note of empathy for all the men who've bedded her ineptly.

Indeed, she can't even retain the loyalty of a cat, acquired in a hasty moment of post-coital regret and showered with love, yet clearly wary of the understated energy of unfulfilled, desperation she constantly projects.

Magliano's desire for self-dramatising has been warped, she believes, by the intense idiosyncrasies of Jacqueline Wilson children's novels that she absorbed growing up. And though she creates her own Wilson plot generator, she seeks in vain to emulate the author. Her own fantasy of a domestic setup with husband and son twists into 1980s slasher horror.

Being educated in all-girls' school has left Magliano generally unprepared for adulthood. And she pauses from her sexual awakening for a very funny digression about the two types of girls such a system produces, the eating disorder-afflicted like herself and those who are massively into horses. Whether that's a fair reflection, I've no idea. But it inspires an entertaining fantasy in which the horse girls go out, thrive and run free in the world.

Another digression into her time working at the soap shop Lush is similarly well observed, rooted in her experience but exaggerated into ludicrousness. However, it doesn't truly add much to the thrust of the narrative or our understanding of Magliano's character.

Ultimately, that's crystallised when her cooler friends invite her to a sex party. A do-or-die moment of potential epiphany it represents a real, self-conscious gear change in the story, pruriently compelling as Magliano vividly evokes the exoticism and licentiousness within the club, even as her trained observational eye keeps her detached.

She may not be the fluidly sexual voice of Generation Z that she wanted to be, nor even the most popular occupant of her home with her pet. But there's relief and self-knowledge in the revelation she arrives at.

Magliano is easy company for an hour, with an instinctively wry, revealing take on her experiences.

• Ania Magliano: Absolutely No Worries If Not is on at Pleasance Courtyard at 4.35pm

Review date: 9 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard