The bar for autobiographical storytelling comedy has been raised in recent years. Or, if not raised, twisted into new shapes by the likes of Sarah Kendall, who has pointedly refused to let the truth get in the way of several good tales about her Australian adolescence. Katy Brand has a fine story to tell too, of her youthful obsession with revivalist Christianity.
I doubt there’s much truth-bending going on here, not least because in the telling, this tale lacks dramatic shape or climax. But what it loses in artfulness, it gains in honesty: Brand feels the cringe and does it anyway, parading her teenage egotism and delusion to diverting, if not uproarious, comic effect.
It’s a first foray for Brand into solo storytelling, having made her name as a sketch and character comic. She stakes out her territory early, with a routine about her role as “Sky television’s death correspondent”, called upon to pronounce every time a celebrity expires. The routine is big on relatable self-mockery, smaller on jokes, and the same goes for the story that follows in which teenaged Katy surrenders her adolescence to a cultish church with acoustic guitars for a crucifix and a liking for exorcisms and speaking in tongues.
Her evangelic adventure begins when she is touched by the spirit while paying a sceptical visit to her local church. The nature of this experience – which lifted her across a room, she says – goes un-interrogated, but elsewhere Brand implies that low self-esteem made her vulnerable to the church’s pious certainties. As a Christian, she was made to feel important and superior – and given cover for her fear of sex.
Brand is such a sympathetic host, and the shame she feels at her bumptious teenage self seems so unfeigned, that it’s easy to laugh along as young Katy preaches to passersby in Watford shopping centres, or tells Blue Peter about her “God-shaped hole”.
“I felt like I’d won at Christianity,” she explains – but the victory was short-lived. Her peers at school take the ever-escalating mickey. And soon even Reverend Rory is cold-shouldering Katy, who has the temerity to study GCSE RE and dares to question her church’s Harry Potter ban. “Maybe,” it occurs to her as adulthood dawns, her fellow disciples “were just a bit stupid”.
The face-off with Rev Rory doesn’t come to anything and Brand’s spiritual quest ends with more of a whimper than a bang. That’s dramatically a little unsatisfying, but she plugs the gap with light-touch reflections on the whole saga’s significance. Are young people – such as today’s “Isis teen brides”, for example – particularly susceptible to fundamentalist religion? Was Brand’s flirtation with Christ just “a very longform Derren Brown show”?
For all that she recites (bizarre) passages from her youth Bible, there are no revelations here. But it’s an entertaining tale of a teenager’s search for herself and of the impulses that drive some of us into religion’s comforting embrace.
•At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 29 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
