It’s a thrill when a comic you’re seeing for the first time steps onstage, and you know instantly you’re in safe hands. Hannah Camilleri backs out of the wings, ignoring the audience, talking to someone else. She’s in character as a moustachioed mechanic, soon ministering to the broken-down car of a volunteer in the front row. There’s nothing to it beyond the character’s exaggerated taciturnity, the eyebrow Camilleri cocks to the audience (this is an act for whom the word “twinkling” might have been coined), and the fun of requiring her stooge to join the deadpan act-out. But it makes immediately clear that the Australian has got star quality.
Lolly Bag was nominated most outstanding show at the Melbourne Comedy festival – but it’s the performer, not her show, that makes a big impression here. It presents us with a handful of Camilleri’s sketches and characters and little to bind them together, although appearances by one particularly vivid alter ego, the schoolteacher Mrs Duncan, bookend the hour. Her musical return doesn’t add substantially to her earlier scene, mind you, in which the persona – officious but barely interested, maintaining discipline with a series of shrieking put-downs – invigilates at year eight’s exams.
As with her mechanic, the character showcases a real flair on Camilleri’s part for detailed comic portraiture; so too the pregnant Home Counties woman bragging, without seeming to brag, about her perfect life. There are throwaway moments (a recurring Hitchcockian horror interlude, a “dog woman at a dinner party” skit) and some lingering blackouts between scenes. There’s a scene about a tickling couple that starts silly then takes a pleasingly dark, incongruous turn.
There’s also a cowboy skit (more crowd-work; another floppy fake ’tache) that asks the audience to supply first sound effects, then dialogue – which feels a bit precarious at this performance, but is also rich with interactive comic possibilities only partially explored here. You leave in no doubt of Camilleri’s potential, which is sky-high, and her talent too, of which Lolly Bag is an intermittently sparkling showcase.
At Assembly George Square, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Then at Soho theatre, London, 29 August -2 September.
