Comedy review: Titania McGrath: Mxnifesto, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Titania McGrath: Mxnifesto, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh * * *
Created by stand-up Andrew Doyle and inhabited by fellow comic Alice Marshall, McGrath is a strident, hectoring caricature with some wonderfully contrived coinages and contradictory slogans. She has zero self-awareness and little depth beyond serving as a mouthpiece for illogical thought and avatar for white, trustafarian privilege.
In the hit-and-run of pithy online mockery, she thrives. But sustained over an hour, the endless and impenetrable irony starts to wear thin, the satirical point-scoring hitting successive targets but scoring a pyrrhic victory. The categories for the “intersectional BAFTAs” that McGrath demands are both hilarious and entirely plausible, while her fascist anti-fascist party, Shame UK, echoes history’s examples.
With a dense script, comprehensively addressing virtually all the flash points of contemporary non-debate, joke-for-joke, there’s much to admire. But giving McGrath human form, has, ironically, made her more robotic, a reactive Twitter bot to engagement that the audience isn’t affording her.
Until 25 August