Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

If Canadians are supposed to be disproportionately polite, Kate Barron never got the memo. ‘I’m blunt and direct and I can get away with anything as you lot are so passive-aggressive,’ she barks at her British audience – in the very blunt and direct way she advertised.

It’s a trait she seems to have inherited from her grandmother, who would slip letters of disappointment under her door at night. This is not a recipe for building self-esteem, causing issues which have echoed into the 39-year-old’s adult life.

Barron kicks off her Fringe debut with a robust, clubby set, playing up transatlantic differences, mocking the Brits’ class obsession and sharing her experiences on the dating scene, where she discovered an unhelpful penchant for emotionally repressed – and ideally abjectly poor – men.

Not topics that are unique, but she tackles them with hard-hitting, ribald jokes – and is particularly eviscerating on pick-up culture, dating apps and red flags, having seen more of them than Tiananmen Square on China’s National Day. Her experiences here are hard-won.

Despite this, she says she was always a romantic, having been bought up on Disney cartoons. Though rewatching The Little Mermaid as an adult made her realise what a messed-up message the cartoon has, as she wittily deconstructs it.

Her pursuit of men who were so awful came from a place of low self-worth, as she lets the bombshell news of the hour drop quietly about halfway in: that until very recently, she weighed 13 and a half stone more than she does now.

It opens up more personal material about the anxieties of being a fat person in a world not made for you. And, whatever her initial onstage persona, she describes being far more pliant when around friends because ‘you can’t be a bitch and be fat because then no one wants you around’.

Come lockdown and she took desperate measures to shed the weight through surgery. She has sharp words for those who think that was ‘the easy way out’ – funny at first but increasingly astringent when she discloses the desepate mental state that drove her to such drastic measures, and in the most isolating, terrifying way.

All the laughs she built up over the first 45 minutes dissipate at her candid revelations, that bulletproof stand-up persona melting into tearful emotion as she recalls the trauma she went through when she hit the low.

Her conclusion – delivered in the street outside The Tron tonight after a fire alarm forced an evacuation – is an emotional haymaker as she pledges to be kinder to herself, while not turning against the woman she was as her ‘existence wasn’t always shitty’. It’s a powerful ending to a show that’s raw, revealing and funny.

• Kate Barron: Losing Myself is on at Just The Tonic at The Tron at 9pm.

Review date: 24 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Tron)