Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

In Commute With The Foxes, Amy Matthews shares the details of a three-hour train ride she took from Glasgow to Manchester.

Fear not, for there’s more to it than complaints of crappy WiFi, peculiar fellow passengers and ‘see it, say it, sorted’… though there is a bit of that.

For the premise is that she had something of an existential crisis on her journey. Plugged into her devices, she starts to ponder how lack of connection to nature is bad for us. Sure, we can watch David Attenborough narrating amazing scenes from nature on our phones, but we’ve lost the benefits of a simple walk in the countryside.

This triggers a sometimes ponderous rumination on 21st-century life compared to our simpler past. No wonder we are all going insane and tetchy, she argues, when we are absorbing so much disparate information in a few seconds' scrolling that 100 years ago would have taken unfeasibly complicated research.

And looking into her own personality, she imagines a big cast of Inside-Out-style characters that live inside her head, whose only goal is procrastination, another consequence of information overload. 

Perhaps inspired by the speed of our rail network, Commute With The Foxes is a purposefully slow show, never in a rush to land punchlines but big on description and pontification. Generally, Matthews adds a poetic, philosophical slant to her observations, culminating in what’s pretty much a spoken word piece that surmised the previous hour.

More straightforward observational routines include describing the contents of every vintage clothes shop, which elicits laughs of recognition but is left wanting for something deeper. Similarly, she mentions a semi-recent news story that’s very funny in itself, without much added value beyond the verbatim retelling

The show is classily put together, and Matthews is a relaxed and natural comic, an easy-going, entertaining friend for an hour, as well as an eloquent writer. But Commute With The Foxes is bigger on concept than it is on gags.

Review date: 10 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Tron)