For her second solo show, Jo Griffin (of sketch duo Lola & Jo) is picking up the familiar lament of many a show. She’s single, 36, and living in a flat-share with five other people. It’s a situation even more common with the price of everything rocketing to almost Weimar Germany levels, but how Jo deals with it is rather less prosaic. She decides to head of to a hippy retreat that specialises in working your way through your problems with a healthy dose of magic mushrooms. It’s a fun tale, told with boundless enthusiasm, even if Griffin herself seems easily distracted.
Griffin’s tale of her mushroom retreat is lysergic in its vivid detail. Even from arrival – yurts are involved, of course – her descriptions of the surroundings and of people called things like Tidal Wave and Nutmeg are neon bright. For a performer primarily know for her sketch work, her storytelling is clear and compelling. Jo’s psychedelic experiences are heightened for their comedic effect, but still chime with authenticity.
One issue however is that while her mushroom trip lasted for hours and was, as she tells it, a contemplative, fairly static experience, this isn’t the mode in which Griffin’s comedy operates. An early section when she talks about her first experience with MDMA really fits as she bounds around the stage. You can imagine the energy levels of a loved-up Jo wouldn’t be much different, just with a fair bit more gurning. While her trip is brought to life – patterns, pulsating roof rafters, visions of her late mother and all – in a way that tickles our own mind’s eye, she’s a bit too jittery and excitable to sit in the moment for too long, and she leaps for another tangent. One isn’t sure if it’s the audience’s attention span that concerns her, or her own.
Clash of style and content aside, Griffin is a delightful stage presence. She has a kind of ‘former Blue Peter presenter gone rogue’ energy. All leaps and twirls, rapid-fire verbal digressions, and giddy oversharing (one young gentleman ends up on ‘Mooncup watch’, Just in case!’). How she doesn’t trip over her microphone lead at least once in the tumult is a minor miracle. Also fairly miraculous is that her boundless spirit actually works in raising the levels of the audience, rather than simply being exhausting. Maybe a case of a 21:15 slot being the sweet spot for a Saturday night audience, but you imagine she’d have made a good fist of it even for a midnight show.
‘The Power Hour’ is a very entertaining bit of storytelling, that feels a little baggy and unfocussed even though every little digression and tangent is given a reprise in a typically caffeinated medley at the finale. Griffin obviously loves letting her shows breathe – and jump, and sprint, and headbang, and high-five. If one is beginning to flag towards the end of a long day at the Fringe, there can be few shows more dedicated to trying to raise those spirits.
‘The Power Hour’ runs until Sun 27 Aug 2023 at Assembly George Square – The Box at 21:15