Comedy Review: Esther Manito: Crusade, Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh
Esther Manito: Crusade, Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh ***
Still a relatively new comic, she’s got her wired persona nailed down hard. Anglo-Lebanese, her Arabic heritage tends to be conflated with Islam. So as a middle-aged woman telling jokes, she’s a potential affront to both ISIS and the EDL and offers a couple of sticky anecdotes from her experiences performing in a British flat roof pub and the Dubai opera house.
Yet while her very existence might challenge and confuse the patriarchy, her chief nemesis is Linda, a judgemental fellow mum at school. Although it’s occasionally a stretch for Manito to link her oppression by racist misogynists to persecution from schoolyard gossip, her kids and society’s double standards for mothers and fathers, she just about pulls it off in this compelling debut. Convincingly demonstrating how identity can be imposed from without, she’s nevertheless proud of her father’s ancient bloodline and gets plenty of laughs comparing his parenting style to that of her diffident English husband.
Crusade is a little ill-focused, with perhaps too many strands. But Manito is a performer with undeniable stage presence.
Until 25 August.