Nina Conti, Pleasance One, Edinburgh Fringe

A good start to our Fringe, practicing our skills at queuing whilst slightly damp.

A good start too in the choice of show.  If you've seen Nina Conti on the telly you'll know the kind of thing she does.  Not your everyday ventriloquist.  Her new show, In Your Face, is heavily improvised and relies a great deal on audience interaction.  The only puppet is the snide and sarcastic Monkey, who gets away with insulting audience members while Conti plays the innocent.  But most of her act involves getting people up on stage, putting on them a grotesque mouth which she controls, and providing their voices.

There were a couple of weak points to the show.  The section where Nina is put into a trance by Monkey, who then carries out his own conversation with audience members, dragged a bit.  On another night, with a different set of responses, it might work better, but the lack of laughs was noticeable.  And she was trying out a new ending in which she dons a nude body suit, facing back to front, and places one of the clumpy mouths on the back of her own head.  An intriguing idea, and the bit where she attempted to sit down, bending the wrong way of course, was slapstick funny, but it felt like an idea which needed further work.  No doubt it will have turned into something slicker by the end of the run.

Those two moments only stood out because the rest of the show was so good.  It's certainly not cerebral comedy, but it is remarkable.  The quality of her ventriloquism skills was to be expected.  What impressed most was the ability to improvise dialogue for her  subjects.  She could work their mouths, but not their bodies, and yet much of the time the body language was in sync with what was being said.  How much of that is down to the person feeling a need to adapt their own movements to the words they appear to utter, and how much is Conti's ability to tailor the words to the body language she is seeing, was always hard to tell.  It must be a mentally demanding exercise, especially when there were four people joining her on stage, all given their own distinct voices.

The results were consistently hilarious, and it's easy to imagine going several times and seeing an almost totally different show each night.  Great fun.

Conti's show is in Pleasance One at 21.00 and runs until the 30th.