Comedy review: Titania McGrath: Mxnifesto, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh

Much as Titania McGrath’s Twitter account can sometimes seem indistinguishable from those of real social justice keyboard warriors, so does this live incarnation of the uber-woke blowhard often mimic the smug superiority and rampant egocentricity of genuine Fringe acts, albeit with none of the underlying insecurity on display.

Andrew Doyle's Twitter troll persona is made flesh by Alice Marshall

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

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