Australian comic Jess Fuchs brings her debut show Feral to Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, with a motormouth delivery that fires off tart remarks and home truths. The set, which runs until 30 August, opens with Fuchs declaring a stricture similar to the writers' rule on Seinfeld: no hugging, no learning. She will learn nothing about herself whatsoever, she says, adding: “Really, I’m just here to talk shit.”
A fully formed standup
That might get proceedings off to an underwhelming start, save that the Aussie’s cynical shtick is delivered with tremendous oomph. It is a bracing celebration of unsentimentality from an act who tells it straight about her body, her single life and a trip to Ireland, where she finds her soulmate in the form of a long-sunk ship.
It is one of those debuts that announces a fully formed standup, a cert to be in for the long haul. Cocooned in black feathers, Fuchs is an effervescing chatterbox of a comic, firing off tart remarks, home truths and off-colour comments in every direction. Arrogant yet quick to laugh at herself, the audience love her, as she pursues a Bridgerton-inspired breast enlargement, expounds on “pretty privilege” and writhes in horror at the thought of dating a 45-year-old man, being 32 herself.
Body and family themes
Her mum and sister play entertaining offstage roles, and there is a wickedly unexpected joke about the relative merits, when dating, of seeking consent versus reading the room. If you can parse all this for anything serious, it would be Fuchs’s relationship with her own body, memorably described to this descendant of Holocaust survivors as “the type to survive war and famine” – and about which, as about everything, our host is admirably plain-speaking.
Less serious, but very likable, is Fuchs’s “over-identifying with the ship” on a visit to the Titanic museum in County Cork – before a clifftop walk goes wrong in the show’s final chapter. Perhaps because it finds our host more vulnerable and less imperious, that closing set-piece isn’t quite as distinctive as the firecracking cattiness that goes before.
Closing flourish
But it does enable one choice callback, to an earlier gag about Victorian medicine, and a fine flourish too to close the show. As for the Titanic as a metaphor for Fuchs’s malfunctioning life – well on this evidence, good luck to the iceberg who gets in her way.
