Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

As Shetland’s only comedian, Marjolein Robertson has a fine collection of stories about being a North Sea fish out of water. 
This Fringe show focusses, in part, on her university days here in Edinburgh, the big city where she was flabbergasted to find they have ‘roads for your feet’. Pavements, the locals call them.

She clearly went overboard with all the new possibilities that opened up to her, embracing the nightlife with a head full of dreams and a bra full of loose change - because where else are you going to keep it on a night out? She even set herself a challenge of shagging 52 blokes in 52 weeks. Thankfully this is not a Dave Gorman-style show about those experiences, which – with the benefit of hindsight – should have raised a few flags.

Urban hedonism contrasts with Robertson’s rustic life on the island outside term time. How many other parents would dispatch their daughter to uni with a leg of lamb so she could make herself the Shetland dish of reestit mutton?

There’s devilry afoot as she plays up the simplicity and isolation of island life with a touch of Wicker Man-style menace. She’s convincing enough in these asides that one Londoner in a previous audience thought Shetland must be a fantastical, made-up place. 

Her chatty set also encompasses her Christian background – including an excellent take on why God must be a woman – and some very embarrassing stories from spending lockdown alone. 

She can be disarmingly candid, although other jokes verge on the generic, and she’s warm and slightly cheeky in her delivery. Her crowd work is gentle but effective, endearing by an apparently genuine interest in the response to stock questions.

Offstage, though, all her odd behaviour eventually leads to a diagnosis of ADHD, which doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Not least if you’ve already seen many of the other Fringe shows on the same topic.

Robertson neatly weaves all her previous stories into this personal revelation, but here the show also takes a turn for the informative over the comic. Although Robertson is an engaging and effective communicator, there’s no getting around the fact that brain chemistry is something of a dry subject.

Nevertheless, Thank God Fish Don’t Have Hands – named after a peculiar dream she has – reinforces her reputation as a rising star of the Scottish comedy scene.

• Marjolein Robertson: Thank God Fish Don't Have Hands is on at Stand 2 at 4pm

Review date: 20 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Stand 2