Part of the Edinburgh Student Arts Festival
Lauren Pattison is a foul-mouthed, witty, young Geordie comedian. Her work-in-progress show, which she is hoping to take to this year’s Fringe, is a consistently hilarious if a little overlong look at the various aspects of becoming a “lady”. Pattison explains the inspiration for the show’s theme – a complaint from a male audience member about her swearing – with characteristic style. She uses this incident as a jumping-off point for a range of enthralling and sometimes embarrassing (for her) jokes.
Whilst Pattison frequently mentions to the audience that the structure of her show isn’t fully formed yet, this issue doesn’t really matter as she manages to keep the audience consistently laughing at her self-deprecating and rapidly-delivered anecdotes. These include drunkenly vomiting a chip in front of her boyfriend – an action Pattison describes as being ‘like a cat showing its owner a mouse it’s caught’ – and impersonating a lizard in Wetherspoons to impress a potential beau.
Whilst the majority of the show flows along at a fine humorous pace, there are occasional moments where its work-in-progress nature becomes evident. Pattison increasingly refers to her notes during the later moments of the show and her final routine concerning her ex-boyfriends could do with some shortening for time. However, Pattison still manages to engage and amuse the audience with her acknowledgements of the show’s rough spots and gaps. However, even in this section, she delivers some quality gags, most notably concerning her psoriasis and meeting up with an ex-boyfriend.
Having previously performed at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe with her 45-minute show Reet Petite, Pattison has proven with this current early draft that she has what it takes to carry an hour-long show. As long as she fine-tunes her third act and manages to create opening and closing sections as equally funny as the rest of her routine, she’ll have a successful 2017 Fringe.