Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Juliet Cowan tries to tackle structural sexism and the insecurities society instils in young women in this scrappy show, but doesn’t have the tools to do it justice.

F*ck Off and Leave Me Alone is a jumble of confused, incomplete, inadequately expressed ideas and random thoughts in need of a sharp edit and a more determined sense of purpose.

Cowan – whose TV acting credits include Am I Being Unreasonable? and Cuckoo – starts by revisiting her anxiety-riddled teenage self and says she wants to integrate that version of her into her current self and go on a journey of discovery. And no, I can’t tell you what that actually means. Maybe that’s her ‘Virgo brain’ that she witters on about, but I don’t know what that means either. 

Her main fear back in the day was dying a virgin, which she reveals by recreating how she imaged getting laid when the four-minute warning of impending nuclear attack sounded. Flashbacks to this time are acted out uncomfortably, with Cowan dragging audience members on stage for one scene and leaving them utterly confused as to what roles they are supposed to be playing. 

As her current self, she seems to believe that a middle-aged woman talking about sex is taboo-busting, but hasn’t given much thought about what she wants to say once she’s busted a taboo that was never really there anyway.  So she acts out her sexual fantasies, now she’s no longer a virgin, which turn out to be as dull as hearing about someone’s dreams. Even make-believe sex turns out to be disappointing for her, and for us.

Sorry to use the term ‘middle-aged woman’, by the way. She wants the demographic to be renamed more positively as ‘soup de jour’ because ‘sometimes we’re a bit salty’. It’s not a very good euphemism, yet she persists with it. 

Meanwhile, her claims that this show aims to combat the invisibility of women of her age would be empowering if only she didn’t randomly slag off ‘old people’ soon afterwards.  This, and plenty of other examples, leaves the impression of a show needing a severe rewrite to cut the plentiful waffle and play up the more interesting aspects.

Cowan mentions at one point that she left her husband for a criminal. There might have been a story there, but she leaves it hanging. In fact, she spends more time telling us that her mum’s got a Gary Rhodes herb-growing plant pot, for absolutely no reason. (I’ve also just googled it - it’s in the shape of the chef’s head, which is quite funny, but the way Cowan clumsily describes it, it just sounds like he put his name on it as merch).

Then she shows us around her Museum Of Me, which contains objects from her life, mainly shoes, to zero effect.

She can’t blame the patriarch for this mess, which is entirely of her own making, though she’d surely try, as it’s a running theme, and she can get quite lecturery about it. Very few great jokes start: ‘Another way the patriarchy works…’

The loaded system is represented by a toy version of Marvel’s The Thing, dangling from the ceiling. Cowan occasionally taunts him for not knowing where the clitoris is, or takes her frustration out on him.

Post-menopause, Cowan no longer feels like she needs to be a people-pleaser since oestrogen is the ‘give a fuck’ hormone, and supplies now are drying up. But it would be nice if she gave more of a fuck about being an audience-pleaser rather than chucking a lifetime of gripes – many valid – at us in such a scattergun way.

She’s a dilettante who dips her toes into various ‘skills’ but never learns them to much depth. The extent of her knowledge of Greek, for instance, is that she knows the alphabet. It seems stand-up’s a similar indulgence in which to dabble ineffectively. She won So You Think You’re Funny a quarter of a century ago, and only now is picking up the stand-up career again.

Her slightly unhinged energy has some appeal, and she clearly has no reservations about talking frankly about her life. This could be channelled into something good, but this show is not it.

Review date: 16 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Dome