Em Humble is on a quest. A quest to retell the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in around 55 minutes. It’s a quest bestowed upon her by a magical volume of the tales in question. And it’s a quest she largely ignores. Because those looking for an actual comedic dive into the meat of Arthurian myth might as well spend their time searching for Avalon itself, as ‘The Lady of the Lakes’ is instead a highly discursive show about self-acceptance with the legends of Camelot used as a deliberately rickety scaffold for Humble’s actual narrative. It’s a structure that raises a question: does baking a show’s flaws into its foundations head off critique of said flaws at the pass?

‘Lady of the Lakes’ is as rich in scholarly detail as the most half-arsed show-and-tell you can remember from your childhood. Humble hasn’t read the source material, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. She’s barely leafed through a synopsis. Instead, we get a cavalcade of characters that can, at best, be described as tangential to the tale: a union-busting Knight, an officious, Malapropism-prone lake maintenance foreman, and a cheeky street urchin with a surprisingly detailed CV. The best of these are delightful, showing a keen ability to play with recognisable character tropes in incongruous settings; the gig economy-coded Knight being a fine example.

There is, by design, a little too much going on. It’s an understandable impulse for a performer’s debut show to demonstrate as wide-ranging a repertoire as possible, but a little more time and attention spent on the strongest characters and some judicious trimming of some more throwaway moments – a recorder-playing rat for example – would tighten the show without losing that sense of gentle anarchy.

What can’t be doubted are Humble’s strengths as an engaging, highly likable performer (with a fondness for industrial language that oddly bolsters this appeal rather than detracts from it), and an obvious work ethic that is rather inconsistent with her self-proclaimed weakness for procrastination. This shows in the attention to detail in the little animations and briskly-edited PowerPoint elements that pepper the show, demonstrating an almost Mat Ewins-like willingness to spend hours on individual visual gags.

Coming back to the question posed earlier, the risk is that a show like ‘Lady of the Lakes’ falls victim to criticism for not hitting exact preconceptions, instead of what the performer is actually intending. It’s a bait-and-switch show, one that holds the audience in a state of perpetually delayed gratification. It’s not quite as sophisticated as the best of these: ‘Randy Writes a Novel‘ or John Tothill’s ‘The Last Living Libertine‘ for example, but Humble’s affable presence and eye for lovably eccentric detail – reminiscent of Eleanor Morton – goes a long way. She could, however, trust the audience a little more, and lay out the show’s ultimate theme in a less blatant way. Overall though, she’s earned the carefree little dance she allows herself in the end.

‘Lady of the Lakes‘ is at Below at Pleasance Courtyard until Sun 30 Aug 2026