Channel 4’s hit sitcom Catastrophe featured a couple obliged to start a relationship when they conceive during a one-night-stand. It must have made awkward viewing in Jessie Cave’s household, where she and fellow comic Alfie Brown are living the real-life version of that hilarious scenario. Cave tells the tale in this new show, without any glib distancing or concealment whatsoever. She’s not – it seems – discussing it because she knows it’s a funny story. She’s pouring forth the contents of her heart, and it’s the neurotic oversharing that’s funny, not the situation.
Sometimes, you wince as you watch, wondering how much of this is stage persona, how much the “real” Cave. But the unease is productive: I think she gets the balance right. It’s like a more manic Woody Allen, with pigtails, as the ex-Harry Potter star frets about her lover’s temporary absences, whether she’s a good mum and how to live, if only for a few minutes, away from social media. Just as Tracey Emin embroidered a tent with her sexual partners’ names, so Cave decorates her set with the names of Brown’s exes. The thought of them is an itch that can never be adequately scratched, and Cave doesn’t just articulate that anxiety, she lives it before our eyes.
It’s less standup comedy, more scrapbook of psychosis, as Cave shadow-puppeteers her courtship with Brown, describes her lurid fantasy wedding, and dramatises home-life as a dialogue between 2D cartoon masks. There are missteps: a collage of strangers’ shop receipts tips Cave from relatable neurotic into caricature. But in the main, it’s a disarmingly honest set, insightful into how obsession takes a grip, and fearless of subjects unusual for comedy: extreme love, the blaze of possessiveness, the terror of loneliness. A catastrophe for some, perhaps, but for Cave, unplanned family life proves a springboard to vivid, emotionally naked comedy.
• At Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh, until 30 August. Box office: 0844-545 8252.
