There’s intimate standup comedy, and then there’s Jessie Cave’s shows: animated diary entries tracing the ebb and worrisome flow of her sex life, her self-esteem – and her feelings for her randy ex-lover and the father of her kids, fellow comic Alfie Brown. Three years after the remarkable I Loved Her, which chronicled the couple’s Catastrophe-style hook-up, Cave is back to prove it was no one-off. Sunrise is just as potent, a grownup and emotionally intelligent hour of heart-on-sleeve comedy.
It’s a marvel that the show, so unflinchingly focused on her emotional life, does not feel self-indulgent. That’s because Cave presents it without a shred of self-pity: she’s matter-of-fact even when being devastatingly honest about her tortured feelings. It’s also a tribute to her writing skill. Sunrise pitches us right into Cave’s life, and her head. Much of it is narrated in the present tense; there’s minimal retrospective reflection. And so we trace her journey from loser in love, obsessively Googling her lover’s new partners, to tentative steps toward new romance, forever counting the hours she can spend away from her kids, scheduling sex with frantic efficiency.
It’s an advantage that she has got such a particular story to tell. Who else in standup is addressing a single mum’s unresolved affection for the now-absent father of her children? Again and again, Cave fashions a perspective you haven’t encountered before, or heard so effectively expressed – like the lovely fisherman-at-sea analogy for her yearning for Brown, or her arguments with him about the seriousness of his new relationship. (“Six dates is a gateway to a girlfriend!”) It’s wickedly funny, too, as Cave mocks her attempts to show Brown – and herself – that she can also be a good-time girl, or when, with her new beau, she visits a Harry Potter convention and turns it into a sex party.
It’s all brought to life – a twisted indie romcom in standup form – with little more than some talking-head pillows, and Cave’s faith in the funny side of her obsessive personality and raw-nerve emotional life. That faith is fully justified.
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At the Stand, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
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