Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

What a phenomenal tour-de-force comedy performance this is. Ruby McCollister is an over-the-top force of nature, massively over-emoting every beautifully melodramatic line.

She performs with a high-volume intensity that makes Brian Blessed seem like Whispering Bob Harris. Her voice can go through five registers in a single sentence, while her mane of Titian hair flies around like it’s got its own choreographer.

Sometimes she’ll speak-sing like she’s Aretha Franklin or launch into a full-throated song in what can feel like an hour-long manic episode. Occasionally, she might let a smile crack at the ridiculous pantomime, but 99 per cent of the time she plays this straight, and the result is compelling.

But such exaggerated intonation is in keeping with the subject matter, as McCollister shares the way she became enthralled by the notion of the tragic Hollywood beauty. Marilyn Monroe is, of course, the apex, but she also cover lesser-know icons of cool such as  Edie Sedgwick and Barbara Payton.

It was an obsession that started in youth. She grew up in Los Angeles, with her father the manager of the Coronet Theatre, a peculiar sex-shop adjacent venue hosting mainly the vanity projects of struggling actors and - bizarrely - the ghost of Charles Laughton. That helped fuel her interest in tragedy, while the visiting would-be divas set her heart on being an ‘ac-tor’.

In thrall to the myth, she became a drug-taking party girl with an eating disorder, before finding a fellow traveller in a stereotypically nihilistic French exchange student. Eventually, the scales do fall from her eyes and she can see past the romanticism of the trope to reveal the self-evident truth that these women were all truly ‘tragic’, victims of  the exploitative side of the Hollywood machine. For all that, McCollister also laments her lost youth.

Straightforward autobiographical stories can be found in every room in Edinburgh this month, but McCollister makes hers uniquely entertaining through the power of her astoundingly flamboyant performance, which needs to be seen to be believed.

Review date: 16 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly Bristo Square