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 intensity of somebody giving her ‘Hamlet’, and her belief pays off – a most excellent fancy.
