Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

So here it is: the most nakedly therapeutic, self-absorbed, indulgent Fringe show you might clap eyes on this year.   

Let’s take a moment to salute the bravery of Isabella Charlton’s committed performance of an autobiographically exaggerated character so chronically privileged, unlikeable and lacking in self-awareness. It takes balls to present and claim as her own the traumatic event of the title, given it actually occurred before she was born.
 
It is too easy to scoff. Isabella’s parents, both lawyers, were doing well enough to live in Central London with a resident 17-year-old nanny to take care of Isabella’s older brother while her mum was pregnant with her. 

The father sounds like a priapic narcissist with his multiple affairs and extraneous children.  After a sting operation with a press photographer, the ‘catastrophic’ outcome is that Charlton is raised in Hong Kong by her now divorced mum, grows up bilingual in Chinese and English and gains an Atlantic College accent despite being educated privately near Cheltenham (although expelled for attacking someone for being plain, possibly a fiction).  Making the best of this life of bitter deprivation (!) Charlton becomes a lawyer herself, grows up stunning, maintains a relationship with her father and lives internationally. 

Wearing her daddy ​issues with pride, Charlton’s character presents some eyebrow-raising anecdotes. At one point, she forced an audience member to read in as the father in the transcript of an audio sex tape, then goaded and yelled at him for not doing a good enough job. (He did.)  The punter was so good-natured he didn’t lamp her, but carry on like that, and it will happen.  

There was further audience embarrassment and discomfort – plain old-fashioned bullying, in fact – for a couple in the front row. without any conciliatory acknowledgment of this unfairness.  
 
It is a challenging watch. To witness a Private Eye story made flesh is a salutary experience – what invokes a snigger in the press has more heat and pain when narrated and fleshed out in person.  

Yet the show felt like a deposition on a first visit to a therapist, with the heightened Isabella character setting out her stall of why she’s there. It feels like she should pay the audience. 

The main character energy Charlton brings to the performance is by turns heroic and offputting, compelling and infuriating. She is hard and bright, in total control of a story told retrospectively, when as lived experience she had no agency.

Review date: 5 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Julia Chamberlain
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Patter House