Edinburgh Fringe Reviews: Adele Cliff & A Poem and a Mistake

Adele Cliff believes that all comics are liars, and she’s here to own the consequences says Frankie Reason.

★★★

This is Cliff’s eleventh visit to the Edinburgh Fringe, and it shows. She’s entirely at ease on the stage, and dialogues with her audience as comfortably as she would an old friend (perhaps whom she hadn’t seen in a while). 

Her ‘vibe’ is self-confessedly bohemian – you could be forgiven for suspecting she has an undue ‘interest in hemp’ and owns a cat. 

In fact, she is visited by an army of cats but prefers the moniker ‘cat woman’ to ‘cat lady’. Cliff’s embrace of the anti-hero doesn’t quite square with the playfulness of her comedy. She goes for the occasional barbed remark but largely the material is animated, clever, and thoughtful.

The top of her set is excellent and regularly has the audience laughing out loud, but by the latter half we had all settled in to charmed smiles.

She is witty, honest (though she claims not to be) and frequently vulnerable, but she falls short of eliciting unbridled laughter. 

Adele, Adele Adele… Cliff isn’t the consequences of my action is on until 24 August at Just the Cask Room at Just the Tonic at The Mash House.

A Poem and a Mistake is a one-woman show well worth seeing, Frankie Reason finds. 

★★★★

Playwright Cheri Magid’s black comedy confronts the mythic transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses through the lens of sexual violence. 

Sarah Baskin plays Myrrha, a classics student whose insensible professor is one day caused to transform into Myrrha herself and undergo the events of the poem. 

Baskin, directed by Michelle Bossy, is mesmerising. Her fluid character is another clever allusion to the play’s classical material, and she executes each shift with agile precision. 

When a god enters the room it’s a strong, arched back and a haughty expression, and when a man, round shoulders and a grimace. Baskin’s movement about the stage is as articulate as the script. 

Myrrha’s professor, Lucian Smyrna, apparently a ‘cross between Steve Irwin, Sir David Attenborough – and Professor Ian Duncan,’ is the play’s Achilles’ heel. Smyrna’s gormless appeals to the gods in a bizarre amalgam accent from Baskin became ever so slightly tedious.

Nevertheless, a compelling execution of an intelligent script.

A Poem and a Mistake runs until 24 August at Drawing Room at Assembly Rooms.

Read more Fringe Reviews here.

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