Comedy review: Helen Bauer: Little Miss Baby Angel Face, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh

The brash, ebullient Helen Bauer establishes her superiority from the first, extolling her legendary status, condescending towards petite women and shutting down any potential backchat with a wan smile and schoolmarm's snapping motion of her hand.

Helen Bauer: Little Miss Baby Angel Face, Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)

Helen Bauer: Little Miss Baby Angel Face, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh * * *

The source of this Fringe newcomer's front? Well, she trained at her mother's in-house suburban drama school, an institution without boundaries that served more as therapy for its founder than as a pathway into the acting industry. Consequently, Bauer has a lot of competitive tension with her fantasist parent, though her relationship with her distant father is arguably more problematic, given her yearning for a tragic backstory and the horrible role that she inadvertently cast him in with a teenage school monologue.

There are plenty other unresolved issues in her life too, from the ex who refuses to acknowledge their relationship, to her self-deceiving approach to kebab shops. Drawing from her German ancestry, she momentarily burnishes her considerable authority by barking in Teutonic tones, and has an hilarious theory about her grandparents' moral leanings in the war. A charismatic, if rather bulldozing storyteller, she proves that those eccentric lessons at the Anne Bauer School were far from wasted.

Until 25 August

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