@ The Stand, Edinburgh on Sun 25 Oct 2015
Considering her show has such a confrontational title, Fern Brady isn’t the incandescent ball of misanthropic rage one might expect. There is plenty of Glaswegian snark and snarl there, and she excoriates her targets mercilessly, but her fierceness is shot through with an iron core of intelligence and tempered with an innate good nature that soon dispels the fears of those souls who’ve found themselves sat within intimate distance of the front.
She seems a little tentative at first and it’s a while before her material gathers momentum, perhaps due to a sizable period of time since her last performance, but she is undeniably skilled and the show is very well structured as she moves between topics with an admirable flow that has clearly been honed over time yet never feels performed by rote.
Subjects include her becoming an unwitting and entirely clueless authority on the Scottish Referendum courtesy of Channel 4, her resemblance or otherwise to a hammerhead shark, massive hands (they’re not actually that big, she is rather tall), pilled-up hoovering and what being middle-class in Scotland really means.
The standout of a consistently fine hour however is her thoughtful, witty, analysis of mental health issues, or ‘going mental’ as she succinctly puts it. She maintains the self-deprecating tone she uses all evening, but there is crucially not a hint of self-pity. She then drags a luckless chap from the front row (and we were convinced we were safe!) for a hilarious read-through of her mid-breakdown dating-app encounter with an enthusiastic foot fetishist that becomes increasingly filthy and toe-curling for her hapless victim.
This approach is a stroke of brilliance. Brady avoids reducing potentially difficult material to a monologue, and keeps the tone light without trivialising the subject. They have very different styles, but Brady is not unlike the excellent Eleanor Morton in that they both use their comedy to explore their own neuroses with the off-kilter manner that the world affects them in ways that are funny, accessible and dodge any risk of navel-gazing solipsism. As more and more people are affected by such issues, it’s important that we have people who can broach the subject with verve and irreverence rather than worthy solemnity.
While Brady is acidic enough towards those stereotypes she meets on a daily basis, the title of her show is perhaps a little bit of a misnomer. She has a spiky side, sure (‘shut your eyes; or I’ll poke them out!’), but she is far too thoughtful and, yes, pleasant to be the young curmudgeon People are Idiots implies.