Comedy review: The Girls in a Bath (Street), Glasgow

WE WERE promised an actual bath somewhere amidst proceedings, but disappointingly the budget wouldn’t stretch that far. Instead, what we got was a backroom triple bill of young, female comedians from Scotland, each with a distinctive voice and a skilfully-worked style.

The Girls in a Bath (Street)

The Griffin, Glasgow

* * *

Compete was Anna Devitt, the most traditionally styled but also the most wildly successful act of the three.

Devitt surely has one hand on the title of female successor to Frankie Boyle.

She worked the crowd with supreme confidence, unleashing frank banter about STIs she may have known and in which combination she’d like to sleep with the men in the crowd, all delivered with a well-stocked store of gags, a charmingly brutal way with the language and a show-stopping vocal performance from her own belly button.

Elsewhere, Leona Irvine appeared as Dolly’s Daughter, the unhinged offspring of Dolly Parton, who may have been fantasising about her apparent abandonment as a child by the country singer and collection of downhome bon mots passed on by her “mother” It was tightly conceived and executed character comedy, although perhaps the detached, dreamy drawl took away from the best punchlines’ sense of immediacy.

A similar criticism might be levelled at Skye’s Sara Hunter, whose appearance as an edgy and inadequate compulsive people-pleaser was removed from reality – her set was quick-witted and inventively designed, particularly a great sequence about taking lifestyle advice from glossy magazines – but whose deliberate sense of eager overcompensation flattened some of her better material, so that it felt only as weighty as the intentionally awful puns with which she softened us up.

dAVID pOLLOCK