Sophie Willan review – cheery standup skewers lazy labels

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
In a cracking show, Branded, Willan has an easy rapport with the audience as she interrogates her identity as a northern, female, working-class comedian

Northern, female, working-class. When Sophie Willan made her comedy debut last year, the industry pounced on her – she tells us – because of who she was, rather than what she did. “I never expected my identity to be more sellable than my talent,” she says now, introducing a cracking sophomore hour, Branded, that strains against those and other pigeonholes. It’s complex, broadly comic and thoughtful, never stinting on Willan’s trademark blunt and gossipy good cheer.

To begin, she interrogates those three identifying terms. Northern? Shorthand for nostalgic ideas about whippets and salt-of-the-earth values, against which Willan interposes modern Manchester and its love of hummus. Female? Cue dating stories, including a bathetic account of why you shouldn’t go green at a “traffic light party”. Working-class? A label whose hip-again status Willan gleefully mocks, before complicating the picture of her own background – not just the abandoned daughter of a drug-addicted mother, but also a Bolton-to-Bristol exile teased by her friends for returning home posh.

I’d love to hear her thoughts on why working-class is back in vogue. But Willan quickly moves on, reprising material from her 2014 theatre show about her long-lost dad (not, as it turns out, Richard Ashcroft of the Verve), and adding background to her 2016 standup show about growing up in care. We’re invited to her “vegan birthday party on a council estate hosted by a heroin addict”, and she recalls the brief promise of social mobility when New Labour came to power and her gran pegged her as the new Marilyn Monroe. (With this and Ingrid Oliver’s show next door, do I sense a rehabilitation of Tony Blair under way in fringe comedy?)

The political and personal intertwine effortlessly in Willan’s final third, as she charts the death of that dream via austerity, the bedroom tax and her struggle to work in the arts without family support. It’s not just poverty that’s the problem: when she takes up sex work, the disapproval of her middle-class feminist friends is painful too. But “feminist” and “escort” are just more identities that we’ve allowed to become too narrow, she argues. If that sounds heavyweight, it’s all leavened by Willan’s optimism, easy rapport with her audience and weakness for the cheeky aside. It’s her talent, not her identity, that makes Branded well worth seeing.

• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Box office: 0131-556 6550.

Contributor

Brian Logan

The GuardianTramp

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