Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Lucinda Spragg is one of the more recent additions to the pantheon of caricatures parodying right-wing rabble-rousers – laughable, ridiculous grotesques like Al Murray, Rosie Holt’s Tory MP, and Nadine Dorries.

Grace Millie has to do very little to turn reality into comedy. Her swivel-eyed character – here doing a de facto audition for GB News – could be reading out of the actual broadcaster’s playbook. She portrays herself as a bold freedom fighter and fearless renegade, nursing a persecution complex that the intolerant woke elite are out to shut down marginalised voices like hers – privately-educated, wealthy white bigots. Find out how she’s being silenced by joining her millions of followers across dozens of outlets.

Spragg grasps the post-truth world with vigour, sharing Michael Gove’s belief that ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ – handily enough since she doesn’t want what she’s selling challenged by inconvenient facts – and amplifying it with song.

Luckily, Millie is a powerhouse performer, with the necessary chutzpah to turn what, on paper, might look like a Daily Telegraph opinion column into parody. She, like the people she’s satirising, has the self-assurance needed to convince audiences that black is white, and rolls with the rowdy encouragement she gets from some quarters of the room.

The desperation to be relevant is played up a little – the awful poems and even more awful ‘stand-up’ Spragg does in a doomed attempt to impress the TV producer certainly has a taste of that – and even her super-confident facade takes a bit of a beating when a supposedly chummy interview goes sour.

It’s a valiant attempt to make her a little more than a one-dimensional character, but only partially successful. That Spragg is so gobby and over-the-top awful is clearly what Millie revels in as a performer, so (again, like the real thing) nuance can go out the window.
How close this is to reality is illustrated when she plays out a sincere song that Laurence Fox recorded lamenting the state of the world, full of his usual ‘divorced dad who can’t see his kids’ energy – and that gets similar laughs to Spragg’s scripted material. She doesn’t add many actual jokes to the new-right rhetoric, just letting the absurdity speak for itself.

That is, in large part, the point. The show starts with a montage of female right-wing nutjobs from Marine Le Pen to Giorgia Meloni – and Millie wants these real vile monsters to be considered as jokes. She’s preaching to the converted, sure, but it’s reassuring to mock the other tribe – and in that, she’ll never be short of raw material.

Review date: 5 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot