Les grand dames of Edinburgh Fringe cabaret comedy have still got it – the ability to give a voice to the disgruntlement of the middle class and middle aged.
Led by the indomitable Dilly Keane at the piano, the trio rail the unjust, and have a great David Cameron gag and an even better one about Cheryl Cole. Dilly jests that she is Beethoven light, where in fact she is more Victoria Wood dark, while Adele Anderson contributes her lofty intensity to their greatest hit and more. The title song Cheap Flights from this show has gone viral on You Tube, or fungal, as she so purposefully misinterprets it. Six million hits and counting, it is a natty tune that bears their satirical hallmark of quality.
New recruit Sarah Lou Young fits in beautifully, wiping off numbers from their average age as if they were being currently quoted on the Dow Jones on Wall Street. She does rather look like the latest recruit to British Airways cabin crew, with Adele more and more resembling Ab Fab’s Patsy. With no sense of irony, they do at one point rhyme “Lumley” with “glumly”.
Donning brightly coloured hi-top boots, they launch into a spangly gangsta rapper routine. The audience, who have the vague scent of lavender and wee, adore it, particularly Dilly’s quip about having her own hips, if not being totally down with the ways of hip-hop. They still put the blue into blue rinse, and it really is incredibly nice to have them back.
Like a gift from the comedy gods, Dana Alexander left Toronto for Blighty and relocated in that quaint London suburb of Tottenham. She chooses not to labour the fact that her new home is at the epicentre of England’s current civil unrest.
Clearly her keen powers of social observation have already harvested enough material for several routines from her short period in the metropolis to date. And she is gifted with the ability to come at familiar subjects from different and slightly challenging angles. Being a big girl, her routine bulges with the reasons why tall girls always end up with small men, and has some interesting theories to debunk the age-old premise that size doesn’t matter.
Relationships and their bearing on a personal maintenance regime is laugh out loud funny, and the vast majority of men in the crowd were cackling helplessly at her scant disregard for social niceties.
There are no easy laughs – well unless you include some merciless remarks about “back fat” – as she targets the suicide jumpers on the Underground. Those attention seekers who opt to make the last leap during rush hour come in for particular disdain.
She started out on the comedy circuit in Canada when she was 18, and deploys every one of her 12 years’ experience to haul the audience along for the ride, no matter how rough it may get. Profane and personable, she is a considerable comic presence.
With the appearance of a young Jane Asher, a shock of auburn hair and a wholesome smile, you are not wholly prepared for the graphic and detailed dirtiness which is about to follow. Diane is a natural raconteur, casting line after line and reeling you in with the smutty hook. As she helpfully points out in the telling of her tale, “I can do clean, but I can’t do inoffensive.”
She is blessed with that rare ability to make you go along on her journey, making every detail come to rude and vigorous life. Her depiction of pole-dancing techniques using only the long fingers of one hand is particularly memorable, and strangely erotic, in a glove off kind of a way. When she describes a lazy Sunday morning, every cringeworthy detail is etched in the memory, even if it is a complete work of fiction.
Her vowels are not quite cut glass, but Spencer is all chic geek with enough sauciness to be the bastard daughter of Fiona Richmond, the infamous naughty magazine columnist of the 1970s. She also has a marvellously inventive comic mind, with an observational routine involving a ferret being in or out of the box drawing you into her nonsensical world. One of the brightest and filthiest young things in the comedy world.
Fascinating Aida until August 29, Dana Alexander and Diane Spencer until August 28.
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