Rosie Holt has taken shows to the Fringe before. But it’s fair to say that to 99 percent of her current audience, she’s a new act. Her star has risen exponentially since lockdown, when she reinvented herself via a series of excruciatingly brilliant viral videos performed in the persona of an ambitious but somewhat bewildered Tory MP, ready to defend the indefensible if it’ll boost her career.
The clips have received millions of views and the rise of Liz Truss has given Holt’s whole shtick a real zeitgeistiness, given our future PM is pretty much the living embodiment of everything Holt is sending up. Clearly she could have taken new show ‘The Woman’s Hour’ to a much bigger venue than the Pleasance Attic, and the whole run sold out aeons ago (though a few tickets are released at the box office at 5pm each day).
But relaunching her standup career in a small room doesn’t feel like a miscalculation – rather a sensible appraisal of where she’s at as a live performer.
Essentially a lo-fi political character sketch show, ‘The Woman’s Hour’ has an agreeably ramshackle quality. There’s something very endearing about the way Holt laboriously changes outfits in front of us, with the changes covered by pre-recorded conversations with her mum. Said chats form the meat of a fun quasi-autobiographical through thread to the show, that plays on the fact that since finding internet fame a lot of people assume Holt is a real Tory MP.
The characters are basically four Tories (Rosie Holt MP, a rightwing TV host, Kirstie Allsopp and - fuck it, why not - Liz Truss), plus ‘female Russell Brand’, ‘horrible leftie’ and a disgraced Tory MP’s hot French wife. Clearly it’s skewed a certain way politically, although the two non-rightwing characters are the funniest and least sympathetic, with female Russell Brand a gibberish-spouting sex pest and the horrible leftie a bitchy posh girl who condemns everyone as ‘problematic’ behind their backs.
Holt feels sorrier for her Tories. The silliest is Allsopp, who performs a ‘ballet’ while spouting out the odd nonsensical line about saving up for a house by cutting down on avocadoes. But she looks bewildered and trapped, stuck in a persona she doesn’t know how to leave. Truss is a brief but effective bit about our future PM being paralysed with fear over when the appropriate moment is to make an arm gesture when responding to a question. The wannabe provocative talk show host character is pliant and accommodating to her disdainful male producers. And Rosie Holt MP is tired and a little desperate, wearily pleading with her kids to let her temporarily remove the woke stuff from the bookcase while she sits down for a Zoom leadership hustings, grinning fixedly and fruitlessly trying to get a word out as male rivals talk all over her.
‘The Woman’s Hour’ isn’t an agit-prop anti-Tory show. It’s in fact defined by the potency of Holt’s empathy for her characters – which makes the depths they’re prepared to sink to all the more pitiable. It’s a bit DIY, a bit rough around the edges, and you have to think that the only realistic way forward for her is bigger, slicker, better-directed shows. But where her characters would cheerfully flog their own children for a shot at the big time, Holt has absolutely earned the right to take success at her own pace.
