Scottee: Class review – check your privilege, row A

Disdain … Scottee bluntly shares traumatic details of his past. Photograph: PR

This is a deliberately uncomfortable watch. In a lecture-style monologue, working-class artist Scottee adopts an abrasive tone as he schools his predominantly middle-class audience, demanding we scrutinise our attitudes towards the postcode lottery of class. At the door, he uses Waitrose tokens to ask us what the working class need more: love or money. “Sixty per cent of you said money.” He sticks out his hand. “Go on, hand it over.”

Unlike a lot of shows that involve personal, sometimes distressing testimony, Class doesn’t allow us to pat ourselves on the back for having engaged with a difficult topic. Instead, it berates us and sends us home with our tails between our legs. There is a sense in which we can’t win in answer to any of his questions; all our responses will be met with scorn. But having often been the only working-class artist in the room, Scottee has had his fair share of embarrassment and shame; now it is our turn.

Damned … Scottee: Class tackles class assumptions. Photograph: PR

Any idea of performative wokeism is quickly stamped out; our empathy and pity are not wanted here. As Scottee bluntly shares traumatic details from his upbringing, he suggests how a lack of money can feed into prejudice and violence, while damning the exploitative and voyeuristic Benefits Street attitude of a singular working-class experience as a spectacle. And while some of the dramatic techniques he uses are trite – leaving moody, puppy-eyed pauses for the sad bits to sink in and wheeling a mirror on to ask us to check our privilege – his berating monologue on the cultural capital of misery is a topic that needs more space on stage.

Class knots inside you and makes you feel like crap for an hour. I wonder about the decision to choose scathing disdain for his audience over generosity towards arguable allies who have paid to be there, to listen. But it is a particular privilege for that feeling to be momentary, just as is the ability to ignore these discussions.

Class may not be an easy watch, but at the fringe, a space that continues to shuts people out as it gets more and more expensive, it is an important one.

• At Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, 7-11, 14-18 and 21-25 August.

• Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews.