Krystal Evans hasn’t exactly been coy about the content of her debut Fringe set ‘Hottest Girl at Burn Camp’ – look up an interview with her or the various think pieces that have touched on stand-up shows at the festival making use of personal trauma and you’ll find out what the big revelation is pretty quickly.
Still, the show seems to be structured with the idea that the audience doesn’t already know what The Bad Thing is, and I didn’t know myself, so no spoilers here.
Quirkily dressed in a scout uniform in a way that suggests the show might be heavily based on her experience of US summer camp (it’s not), Scotland-dwelling American Evans spends the first 15 minutes or so of her set introducing herself as somebody who grew up in rural Washington State with a dysfunctional, mentally ill mother. She also indulges in lots of general preamble, including rather coyly taking a pop at the current trend for stand-up shows with unfunny true stories in them.
Then she drops her unfunny true story, and it’s devastating. It changes the tenor of the night totally, an emotional shift so extreme that even when she starts the gags up again you can sense the audience feels a bit uneasy laughing.
At heart, it’s a show about being raised by somebody who cannot look after you, something Evans wasn’t necessarily aware of at the time and is clearly very much trying to make peace with now.
And it’s a powerful show, but with my absolutely dead-eyed theatre guy hat on, I can’t help but think that there’s a layer of craft missing that could make this thing sublime. Evans lets something incredibly powerful out when she talks about the awful family tragedy she experienced, but she then kind of moves on from it. I can imagine this may well be because talking about it in depth might simply be too painful. But either way, she never quite controls the force she has unleased – it feels like a good show with an extraordinary one hiding inside it somewhere.
