Comedy review: Liza Treyger: In the Weeds, Underbelly - Bristo Square, Edinburgh

A pansexual millennial in therapy, with addiction issues and a tricky relationship with her Soviet immigrant parents, New Yorker Liza Treyger has plenty to unpack in this sporadically excellent but generally patchy debut.

Liza Treyger: In the Weeds, Underbelly - Bristo Square (Venue 302)

Liza Treyger: In the Weeds, Underbelly - Bristo Square, Edinburgh * * *

Chattily aloof, you'd say she really knows her own mind, were it not for the fact that she's paying a medical professional to suggest otherwise. With penetrating social analysis and some pretty hot takes on both Maslow's hierarchy of needs in relation to the immigrant experience, and the future of porn, she's nevertheless totally superficial in her habits and self-obsessed to the point of absolutism.

Trashy US television shows are blithely deconstructed, as if she just assumes that we all watch them. On another night, you get the impression that this precociously jaded solipsism might fly. But for whatever reason, she wasn't feeling the energy in the room when I caught her and gave the impression of second-guessing the audience. Although convincing as a voice of her generation, amusingly candid about her self-destructive appetites and just scrambling to dissect her personality, Treyger struggles to package it all together into something more meaningful and the laughs come in frustrating bursts of feast and famine.

Until 26 August

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