How to calibrate your expectations on approaching Fiona Allen’s new show at the Edinburgh fringe? On the one hand, she is comedy royalty, one-third of iconic 00s sketch show Smack the Pony. On the other, standup is her “encore career”, a new direction for a woman now making her festival debut aged 58. There is enough in On the Run to suggest the Lancastrian has the makings of a fine comic. But (expectation management incoming …) it’s more the show of a rookie than a veteran.
It’s called On the Run because this new pursuit is Allen’s way, she tells us, of escaping her family. A mother of three, much of her material covers parenting and married life with her chaotic husband. It’s not adventurous, but Allen brings the spiky perspective of a woman kicking back against the dull domestic assumptions of motherhood. That teddy bear your kids bring home from school? Allen poses it for some very uncompromising photographs. The trend for positive-affirmation parenting? You can bet Allen doesn’t feel positive about it.
The show meanders across this terrain without much tonal variety. A rhythm establishes itself: Allen introduces a subject, steers it towards a punchline, then moves on. Those punchlines are often weak, and some promising jokes (see the one about the murderous affinities between hitchhikers and lorry drivers) peter out for want of development. But all that may come – and at least, in the meantime, Allen makes for confident and appealingly barbed company, with vivid characterisations of her Spanish mum and Aussie hairdresser, and a handful of stronger gags, such as the despairing number about buying coffee at a drive-thru. Her new career may not, yet, merit an encore – but Allen raises a few smiles.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 20 August.
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