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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Hitchcock meets Blanche Dubois from A Streetcar Named Desire, with Bernard Herrmann\u2019s score for Vertigo playing in the background. It\u2019s also mime and ventriloquism and physical movement and historical recordings and – as you might expect if you caught Lyons\u2019s last show Horses – part nature documentary. It\u2019s\u00a0 \u2026 Well, like I said, it\u2019s quite something.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not Michael McIntyre. We can agree on that.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s most idiosyncratic, ambitious comedians-stroke-clowns-stroke-performance artists (admittedly, that may be a relatively small group) and it\u2019s a compelling, disorientating piece of work inspired by Hitchcock (as already established), Ruggero Leocavallo\u2019s 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\u2019s reading.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s possible at the start of the evening he didn\u2019t expect to be standing in front of an audience reading sexually charged dialogue; he acquits himself very well).<\/p>\n
Lyons is herself half woman on the edge, half prancing show pony (she perhaps hasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
The highlight may well be the opera section \u2026 Let me repeat that, the opera section \u2026 in which Lyons sings, \u201cverbatim\u201d, all the excuses men have given her for not wanting a relationship. It\u2019s both horrifying and hilarious.<\/p>\n
This, as you might have gathered, is not really like anything else you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n