Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015: comedy reviews

This review is from the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It’s a testament to the almost fanatical self-belief that Redditch-raised comic Lorna Rose Treen pours into her character comedy that it looks for a while like she might actually be going to perform her entire debut Fringe show ‘Skin Pigeon’ in the persona of a nine-year-old Brownie with a weird voice.  In fact, the awkward bordering on sociopathic Brownie is the most frequently recurring character in ‘Skin Pigeon’. For reasons you won’t discover until the end, she lends the show its somewhat terrifying name. But she’s also just part of an eventual pantheon of characters that are united only by the outlandishness of Treen’s ideas and the almost absurd levels of conviction she invests in them. There’s an eccentric Kiwi netball teacher who sets the audience various extremely low-grade physical challenges. There’s Sally Rooney, debuting her extremely Sally Rooney-ish kids’ picturebook. There’s a dolphin looking at itself in a mirror. There’s an incredibly socially awkward woman who just… turns up in places. There is a cameo appearance that will blow your mind.  It is inventive as hell, with much of the joy coming from the simple fact Treen had any of these ideas in the first place. But it’s also the lack of smug fourth well breaking or explaining the overriding concept or even giving us a clue who the real Lorna Rose Treen is or what she sounds like until the very end. She attacks each of these ridiculous scenarios with the

The flagship venue of legendary Scottish comedy promoter Tommy Sheppard (who also counts the Glasgow, Fife and Falkirk comedy festivals, the Assembly Rooms Fringe venue and two other Stand branches, in Glasgow and Newcastle, among his interests), The Stand Edinburgh is quite simply the king of comedy venues in Scotland’s capital. Its poky wee stage (no bigger than your average Travelodge shower stall) has been graced by the great and good of UK and international comedy – stories still abound of that time Johnny Vegas hijacked an industrial floor buffer for his act, while alt.comedy stars Stewart Lee, Bridget Christie, Simon Munnery and Daniel Kitson all still make regular sojourns here. Local heroes visit frequently as well – Kevin Bridges and Frankie Boyle drop by whenever they have new material to workshop, be it at purpose-booked engagements or as surprise guests at the weekly Red Raw new talent night (where old hands polish new jokes as complete novices step up for the first time). What impresses about The Stand is how, having ticked all the boxes that make it a great live comedy venue, it’s gone on to be a superlative bar as well. The beers on tap include the usual mainstream suspects (Heineken, Fosters), but also feature the locally made (and cherished) Three Hop lager. The food – nachos, burgers and other pub grub favourites – is of a higher standard than that at many nearby joints where the menu is a main feature rather than an optional extra. And the atmosphere – you