Well, this is quite something. What that something is, admittedly, is somewhat difficult to explain. Try this, though. Imagine a comic treatise on a broken heart and male inadequacy, but delivered as a fever dream, full of mirrors and dry ice and wearing a cocktail dress.
It’s Hitchcock meets Blanche Dubois from A Streetcar Named Desire, with Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo playing in the background. It’s also mime and ventriloquism and physical movement and historical recordings and – as you might expect if you caught Lyons’s last show Horses – part nature documentary. It’s … Well, like I said, it’s quite something.
It’s not Michael McIntyre. We can agree on that.
The Woman on the Edge is the latest show from the Sky Arts Award-winning comedian who is carving out a reputation as one of the UK’s most idiosyncratic, ambitious comedians-stroke-clowns-stroke-performance artists (admittedly, that may be a relatively small group) and it’s a compelling, disorientating piece of work inspired by Hitchcock (as already established), Ruggero Leocavallo’s Pagliacci and NASA, one that demands something of its audience (particularly the poor guy who is coaxed up to read rather a lot of dialogue which Lyons then mimes as he’s reading.
It’s possible at the start of the evening he didn’t expect to be standing in front of an audience reading sexually charged dialogue; he acquits himself very well).
Lyons is herself half woman on the edge, half prancing show pony (she perhaps hasn’t totally thrown off her last show) as she moves restlessly around the stage, finding humour in heartbreak, whilst building a show that draws on all her passions. If nothing else you will come away from this evening knowing rather more about snails and the Apollo 13 lunar mission than you did before.
The highlight may well be the opera section … Let me repeat that, the opera section … in which Lyons sings, “verbatim”, all the excuses men have given her for not wanting a relationship. It’s both horrifying and hilarious.
This, as you might have gathered, is not really like anything else you’re going to see at the Fringe this year. If you want a fun night out with a few guaranteed belly laughs there are plenty of fine comedians to be found at the Pleasance and the Underbelly and the Gilded Balloon and Monkey Barrel this August.
But if you want to see a show that is thrillingly theatrical (with a proper coup de theatre for its climax) by a performer who is really pushing herself and her audiences, and yet is not above re-enacting a Carry On joke in its first few minutes, then this is for you. Remarkable.