Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Little wonder that mental health is such a popular subject for Fringe comedy, given the intensely personal nature of stand-up. And because the hour-long format affords comics the opportunity to truly dig into their problems, to circle and deflect from them - or simply just exacerbate them.

Alison Spittle is doing all three of these in her latest hour. There's an instructive moment about halfway through where she acknowledges she can't accurately remember the incident that triggered her complex post-traumatic stress disorder, only the routine that she wrote about it.

And she opens the show with that warmest, cosiest and safest of subjects: soup. Almost universally enjoyed, yet with its infinite varieties making preferences peculiar to the individual, it's a surprising hearty vessel of laughs. A soupsayer if you will, the Irish comic makes snap judgements on audience members' personalities based on their bowl of choice.

An excellent source of nourishment for the touring act particularly when combined with the budget hotel bath experience, soup is so dear to Spittle that she was invited onto a WhatsApp group of fellow enthusiasts. Policed by a strict admin who bumps group members who don't toe the line, it's highly amusing to hear of the despotism this woman enforces in her tiny little empire on the internet dedicated to an ostensibly wholesome snack. At least the hot debate on whether soup is a food or a drink has been democratically resolved.

The otherwise smiley and personable Spittle's relationship with vengeance is somewhat less straightforward. She’s slow to take offence, tending to misread malevolence, but once she's eventually realised that you've crossed her, be prepared for a carefully planned and snidely executed attempt at annihilation. She does, after all, spend a lot of time in her head. Given what's gone before however, you do wonder if at least part of the elaborate, situation-appropriate devilry of her schemes is because she's already thinking about the routine she'll get out of it.

She's spoken about some of the details of her trauma in previous shows. But she's now sharing her therapist's assessment and gently eases into the subject here with childhood memories of her varying experiences suffering with lice and worms, enjoying the ick factor as she outlines the socially agreed hypocrisy that demonises one parasite more than another.

Back to the recent past, the trigger for her debilitating trauma is essentially innocuous, so much so that her rational self can instantly dismiss it. But her irrational side, unfortunately, has a better track record on predicting the outcomes of such incidents, so she succumbs in spite of herself. That's the ongoing impact of male thuggery, and you really feel for her.

A lengthy diversion into an account of her sister's hen do at a holiday camp is an entertaining tale of debauchery and of abusing sympathy towards the neurodivergent. But it rather distracts from the show's underlying theme, even as it affords some context by touching on the different ways that her sibling and other female relatives' minds work.

Spittle returns to her own mental struggles when she directly links her anxiety to the cost-of-living crisis, as she fears losing the balcony garden that has been her sanctuary. The show suffers from going round the houses when it could have been more explicit and from being blunt, when some subtextual subtlety was warranted. Yet here and in patches throughout the hour, the sense of threatening jeopardy and hysterical laughter are in concert.

Review date: 7 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)