Catherine Bohart: Again, With Feelings, Edinburgh Fringe Comedy review - 'Frequently, cynically, hilarious'

Catherine Bohart: Again, With Feelings | pic: Contributed

Catherine Bohart: Again, With Feelings

Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 3) (Venue 515)

★★★★☆

Arriving at the Fringe with this show fully warmed up from touring, and scooping a deserved Edinburgh Comedy Awards nomination, Catherine Bohart appears to have played a blinder in her preparation. However, Again, With Feelings is an hour that virtually screams of the Irish comic's lack of readiness.

Having hit 36, she's a queer woman contemplating having children and spiralling in her panic, opening with the striking image of her sat on a bus, clutching an overpriced stuffed animal that she's purchased in a moment of anguished haste.

An inveterate lover of gossip, bestowing one of the most salacious tales of betrayal solicited from her Trusty Hogs podcast, Bohart also shares more of herself in this show than ever before: from her admission of using cosmetic treatments, to the messy consequences of her adopting her stage name, to the struggles she has with her age-gap relationship (her girlfriend being eight years her junior).

Disclosing her Irish family's despair at her string of broken partnerships and her mother's none-too-subtle emotional blackmail for her to properly settle down, it's a vivid portrait of a woman beset on all sides by cultural, biological and internalised pressures. For example, Bohart is initially disdainful about her girlfriend's East London houseshare arrangement and the economising way in which she's acquired tableware. Yet she's forced to leave her snobbery at the door, even if ultimately it proves a literal lifesaver that she was so sniffy.

In between the generously offered personal divulgences, she's frequently, cynically, hilarious in her observations on the tensions between generations, the differences between homosexual and heterosexual relationships, and women and men. Foregrounding her inaptitude for life, and yet setting herself up as an authority, she's especially funny when she adopts a motherly tone herself to any newly coupled lesbians in the crowd, a precocious voice of jaded experience.

Jay Richardson

Until 25 August

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