Character comedy seems to be in rude health at the Fringe this year with some incredibly talented acts finding inventive ways to approach the medium. You can add Jess Carrivick to that luminous list. Not just a fine, multi-faceted performer, she adopts a genuinely innovative framing narrative; that of old home movies filmed by her family between 1995 and 2001, as a jumping off point for entertaining, cinema-inspired shenanigans that, while taking some time to take flight, land with unexpected poignancy.

The conceit is that the characters Carrivick adopts are vignettes from the films made by their young selves. These include an unfeasibly ancient doyenne of Jazz-age Hollywood, a parody of Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse (featuring ‘Willem Dafriend’, a lovely gag), and a monstrous mum with a weird obsession with Rowan Atkinson. In between we get a terrific interlude featuring Carrivick as a zealous cinema usher.

While played with vigour and wit by Carrivick, some of these sketches feel initially underdeveloped. A more overarching structure only becomes apparent later on as characters are revisited and little comedic crumbs laid earlier lead to some tasty payoffs. Chief among these is the reprise of the lighthouse keeper who gets a joyfully filthy sea shanty, made all the funnier delivered by Carrivick, who has a deceptively wholesome, butter-wouldn’t-melt quality to her.

It’s a shame the moments which see Jess as her younger self interacting with brother Jack offstage, hinging on their innocent conflating of ‘porn’ and ‘pawn’, are perhaps the weakest. You get the sense these are among the most meaningful to the performer herself. Again, however, the clever structure allows for an expected payoff much later in the show with an ‘In Memoriam’ of chess players with innuendo-laden names.

This eulogy format also sets up the crux of the piece, with a tribute to Carrivick’s late father Gareth (a director of film and TV) arriving so unobtrusively, with so little fanfare, that it’s all the more powerful. It’s a remarkably subtle way of underlying Carrivick’s motivation for the show, the evident wish that her father would be proud of what she’s achieved with the tools and inspiration he helped provide in those formative years. It’s pretty clear that he would.

‘For Your Consideration’ is a show that, for this reviewer, only increases in impact the more one considers it. That it continues to percolate given the frenetic, attention-sapping nature of the festival as a whole says much about its appeal. It still feels like a little patience is required as the comedic highlights are definitely loaded towards the second half, but it is well worth the investment, and rarely has a show’s emotional bomb been so skilfully deployed.

‘For Your Consideration‘ is at Nook at Gilded Balloon Teviot until Sun 30 Aug 2026