‘Good afternoon, ladies and predators!” A host of comedy shows this year have addressed #MeToo, but none quite like sketch duo Lazy Susan’s. Rather than interrogate the climate of anxiety about male misbehaviour – or respond with disclosures of their own – in Forgive Me, Mother!, Celeste Dring and Freya Parker send the whole thing up. It is the most irreverent approach possible, and – as it collapses under Parker’s terror of the threat posed by male audience members – the show soars above anything the duo have previously done.
They’ve always been good, but they have tended to conceal themselves behind their characters. Not so here, where the sketches play second fiddle to the drama of Dring and Parker getting from one end of the show to the other. In a blizzard of an opening, the first questions to navigate are: does the show have an agenda? (nope) and what will we be saying about it afterwards? (Cue banal imagined post-show dialogues.) We’re presented with one gallery of “Sexy women … with a catch” and another of characters who won’t appear in the show, of which the gamine from the French movie written by a man (“Dance with me, Thomas! Dance with me in the rain!”) is a standout.
Soon, the unstoppable force of this intro meets the immoveable object of Parker’s neurosis, as her fortune cookies spell out a fatal threat and her mum keeps asking creepy questions down the phone. Alongside this plot strand, Dring flirts outrageously with a chap in the front row and exterminates intrusive flies one by one.
It is a delight to see these threads interweave as the show progresses, and there are big payoffs – not least Parker’s knockabout cameo as the flies’ grieving mum. The energy lags only during the pair’s standalone sketches, which aren’t bad (I loved the part where they give the early Hollywood musical a #MeToo makeover), but can feel arbitrary, or digressive. But it is an excellent show that asks, tongue firmly in cheek: “Can’t two women do a sketch show on the fringe without a man trying to murder them?” It delivers a constantly funny 60-minute answer.
• At Assembly George Square, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
