Review of comedy's latest alt-right creation

Grace Millie as Lucinda Spragg offers a fabulous piece of character comedy: a burgeoning monster of the alt-right in a raspberry pink pantsuit, with presence to burn.

I had to keep asking myself – and no answer yet found – what made her funny as a barely exaggerated character when there are people in life and on the circuit sincerely spouting the same bollocks, and in those cases it's not entertaining but awful and depressing.  

Spragg has a toehold in reality, rather like early Edna Everage or the Pub Landlord, and like those two has the potential be bigger and yet more of an egomaniac.  God forbid she should be taken seriously.  

The Ladies' College vowels, braying Sloane confidence and bigger-than-life energy make her watchable and the childlike pride in her Brechtian placards (shown on TV screen), poems and songs at least give the character a grain of vulnerability. 

She pitched shamelessly for a spot on GB News to the (supposed) producer in the crowd, who I imagine would have snapped her up, had he been for real.  She pitched her smartly vaccination-denying, proudly anti-woke guff in a way that made you smirk and at times caught you out if you felt perilously, filthily close to agreeing with her partial statements.  That's how they get you, partial truths and near facts. 

Millie cleverly showed the workings of this political approach in which her alter-ego didn’t need to persuade but merely assert that there was already consensus.

There were three points which involved other people – the audience member designated as producer, her tech (who wasn't really the tech) who put a hole in the side of her arguments and an onstage opposite number, drinking buddy and all-round legend whose name now escapes me.  All fulfilled their role perfectly, but Spragg was at her strongest in her character's full spate.

The content of her intentionally dire poetry and wobbly stand-up slowed the inexorable torrent of her personality, although maybe neither she nor the audience could have taken that pace for the hour. For sure,  the 'most awful person on the Edinburgh Fringe' should gather some guilty fans. Charm Offensive has already been taken as a title, but it would be apposite for Spragg's brand of comedy. 

Review date: 27 Nov 2022
Reviewed by: Julia Chamberlain
Reviewed at: Pleasance Islington