Comedy review: Natalie Palamides: LAID

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Laid starts off beautifully then turns into an incredibly dark comedy about women's relationship with their own fertility.

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)

***

Palamides plays a woman who lays an egg every day but must decide whether or not to raise it or to eat it.

It’s not easy. Eggs smash, hearts are broken and our heroine is exhausted by the relentless march of her own finite ability to reproduce.

Someone, I forget who, 
once likened women’s 
relationship with their ­reproductive organs to a war – bloody, violent and devastating.

Palamides captures the ­agony and the frustration 
of it all – but she doesn’t offer any resolution or redemption, nor does she give a thought to women who might have suffered real-life battles with their fertility. This decadent egg-­smashing spectacle offers no help for them.

Until 27 August. Today 4:15pm.