Much as Jessica Fostekew would love to be one of those “airport comedians”, she tells us, the ones who hide their real selves behind slick observational comedy, her shtick is more personal. Her love life, her parenting and her relationship with her body have all been the stuff of Fostekew’s shows in the recent past, and she revisits them all here. Apparently a show about tolerance (if she didn’t tell us, we wouldn’t know), Iconic Breath ranges widely across our host’s life and thoughts, while she conjures with the qualities she has inherited from her lovable but angry dad, and her inspiringly positive but recently deceased gran.
She is an adroit mix of both in this show, with plenty of the trademark furious-but-fun rants about things that tee her off – including a volcanic mocking of female American podcasters and a bit about the pointlessness of meditation. But the show is upbeat, too, plotting a route through despair at the state of the world via the touchline of her son’s football matches, where she finds common cause with parents whose values are a world apart from her own. Not for the first time, Fostekew finds rich comedy in her role as doting but dismayed mum to a son who is maturing into quite the masculine stereotype, with a choice line in passive-aggressive filial put-downs.
One or two of the set pieces here raise an eyebrow more than a laugh, such as the one about the embarrassing pall-bearing incident at her gran’s funeral. One might wish, meanwhile, for more developed thinking about, or reasoning behind, the show’s ostensible theme of tolerance, which seldom comes into focus. But if this isn’t an hour with impetus, it is consistently entertaining, as this “geriatric millennial feminist” riffs on the petty frustrations of co-habitation with her partner, re-enacts an undignified journey on a preposterously crowded tube, and delivers a bulletproof routine about pocket-dialling with her backside while out for a run. She may never be an airport comedian, but Iconic Breath is another Fostekew show that attains soaring altitude with impressive technique and efficiency.
At Soho theatre, London, until 18 October. Then touring from February
