Fern Brady: People Are Idiots

The Stand until Aug 30 (not 17)

Four stars

Anger, as John Lydon once sang, is an energy, and Fern Brady puts hers to good use. The second most famous woman to come out of West Lothian after Susan Boyle take aim at some familiar targets – social class, indyref, mums with kids in coffee shops – but the gags that hit home are far from ordinary: she twists them round and raises them up so that a routine about freak television veers suddenly down a surreal path towards “a man with racist nipples”. There’s an everywoman quality about her that makes it easy to agree with her acid observations about manspreading on public transport or the meditation therapies she undertook after a nervous breakdown earlier this year. The stand-up stage is her natural habitat and the laughs flow from beginning to end. There’s a razor-sharp brain operating here, all the better for being expressed in a seductively husky, seen-it-all voice that sounds about three decades older than her 29-year-old self.

Alan Morrison