Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Alex Franklin’s default setting is to be giddy and silly. Often, this can make her show feel slight, as it’s more about atmosphere and indulging a simplistic playfulness for her own amusement than it is about taut writing.

But the frivolity also provides a robust bulwark against the hour getting too heavy since it revolves around her exploring her gender identity and coming out as a trans woman. 

An opening song sarcastically mocks the notion she’s only done so to sneak into women’s sport – as you might believe if you only read certain newspapers – but the geeky, awkward Franklin is definitely not Olympics material. Like much of the show, she over-eggs the idea, though the result is not without childishly enthusiastic charm.

Her attempts to impose weirdness sometimes seem try-hard and never as much as her ever-more elaborate version of the trolley problem thought experiment. Here, she mistakes randomness for surrealism, with her ideas displayed on a crappily put-together PowerPoint. A similarly low-rent slide show previously asked the audience to identify who is male and female based only on their silhouettes, but quickly descends into basic absurdity  – and a few jabs at JK Rowling. 

Franklin doesn’t really need artificial oddness, as she has plenty of the genuine article. Certainly, her idiosyncratic approach to gift-giving – attributed to her ADHD - is peculiar enough to the extent we probably wouldn’t believe what she got up to had she not presented video evidence.

She revels in the arcane nerdiness of her noodling, never happier than when getting into the fine details of League of Legends with the one other devotee of the multiplayer video game in the room.

Yet while there’s much flimsy nonsense, Franklin is dizzily happy with it, and that’s quite infectious. Plus that’s not the whole show. Another thought experiment invites us to realise we can never truly know something until we have experienced it, which resonates with her gender journey. There are some great gags about she previously grappled with notions of masculinity, ill-advisedly turning to WikiHow for help.

Cutting through all this is Franklin’s fears about how her very traditional father might react to her new identity –and how that’s resolves carries a punch which means the show, which already speaks loudly to others in similar circumstances, ends high on emotion. 

Review date: 21 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly Cowgate