Madeleine Brettingham: Legend comedy review – Deliciously deadpan
With razor-sharp quips and many jabs at absent fathers, the comedian pokes fun at double standards and demands revenge in a darkly funny debut
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How can a show this good be a debut hour? Its gag rate is through the roof, the delivery sure-footed and the quality of Madeleine Brettingham’s material sky high. No surprise then that she triumphed at last year’s So You Think You’re Funny? competition or that she’s already a respected writer for TV. She takes us back to her youth, growing up in dingy pubs under the ‘care’ of her late alcoholic father, a man not averse to wearing an arseless tuxedo. Brettingham categorises him as a geezer, an identity she both relates to and denounces (more of that to come, we’re promised, in her memoir, Wake Up Daddy, The Walls Are Screaming). Escaping Bournemouth, she discovers a whole new world when she gets into uni at Cambridge, graduating between 9/11 and the financial crash; or, as Brettingham memorably describes it, ‘the perineum of the apocalypse’.
In her delicious deadpan delivery, she walks us through her particular brand of feminism. She doesn’t want equality, just revenge: for starters, she’ll replace the Pornhub landing page with a pic of little hedgehogs having a picnic, before becoming the Bonnie Blue of pegging. Human evolution, female showjumpers’ genitals and arcade grabber machines all come under Brettingham’s gaze, subjected to razor-sharp observations before a (literal) firecracker of a finale. Early in the hour, she poses a question: can women be legends or is that just the domain of men? On this thrilling evidence, it’s a status firmly within Madeleine Brettingham’s reach.
Madeleine Brettingham: Legend, Gilded Balloon Teviot, until 31 August, 8.20pm; picture: Steve Ullathorne.