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John-Luke Roberts: Stnad-Up

A wonderfully demented Edinburgh Festival Fringe performance that isn't a break-up show
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John-Luke Roberts: Stnad-Up

A wonderfully demented Edinburgh Festival Fringe performance that isn't a break-up show

Last Fringe, Mike Wozniak delivered a show in which he insisted to the point of doth protesting far too much that he wouldn’t be ‘banging on’ about being miserable living at home with his new wife and her parents. In Stnad-Up, John-Luke Roberts goes to extreme lengths to tell us that this ‘isn’t a break-up show’. But he is frank about the split he had with his girlfriend and comedy partner of many years, though this manifests itself in a hugely enjoyable scene involving a basket of fruit and a mix tape of ‘Hurt’ cover versions, as he recreates the time of their last gift-exchanging. Just before going their separate ways, they also divided up their comedy material, leaving Roberts with the set-ups while she ran off with all the good punchlines.

This is just one of many excellent ideas in the former Behemoth’s new absurdist (as they have it in the Fringe programme) and very busy hour. Amid all the originality (you won’t look at a bag of self-raising flour the same way again), he does mine his own back-catalogue when he insults the audience one-by-one with random barbs pre-written on cards. But even then, he takes it a stage further by using the enormous mirror in this room to berate his own reflection. Wonderfully demented.

Voodoo Rooms, 226 0000, until 24 Aug (not 12), 6.05pm, free.

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