REVIEW: Lady Garden Edinburgh Fringe Pleasance Courtyard

Lady Garden are an odd bunch, sounds harsh before the show even gets started, but I was thinking “a 6 woman sketch show how good is this going to be?”, though I did get a recommendation from the BBC so things were looking up.

The start of the show was a little cheesy and unnecessary the movie preview voice over has been done to death since BBC Radio used it to introduce one of their radio shows (I forget which).  Their early pieces were well put together and what seems to help them is the clear closeness which made the feel of their show something warm.

Their early sketches involved pole dancing; a three bears story that really didn’t go anywhere and came across like a bit from Family Guy; and a girls on tour sketch that seemed to get the crowd going.  But a good insight into what these guys can do comes from their ‘Out of Work Comedian’s’ commercial.  I have to admit I did want this to be a bit darker than it was and there was definitely scope for it to be a bit more risky, but it worked well as it was.

It was clear from the start that they all have a different sense of humour.  Sometimes when they did their whole group sketches it worked but not solid (something I will take back later perhaps).

One of the best bits in the show is when ‘Emilia’ the secatary of LARP (a golbin game) comes onto the stage.  For a few minutes she does a monologue that is so perfect and tight she could have done the whole bit alone.  But then she is joined by Philipa and Steve a warewolf who can’t talk.  The entire sketch was gold, and the three of them worked so well together. This whole sketch was faultless except in that it was too short: it would have been fun to see them play on with this a little longer.

The rest of the show flowed nicely, we got to see Bev and the girls do a dance to Beyonce’s single ladies, which was really odd because I saw them do it the night before on the Royal Mile, I’ll not go into how … In terms of what Lady Garden offer is something I think the Fringe needed and though there are a lot of female comics about the circuit this week I have only seen about 10 and that doesn’t seem fair somehow.  Their show was well written and performed, some of the sketches seemed to not really end as finite as they could but that was the only issue I had.

Overall the show was a great joy to watch. The final song they performed was something no one had expected and this was, simply put, a great sketch that was worthy of BBC 1.  Their final act was strong, well put together, and was, I think, along with LARP, the highlight of the show.