Ashlee Bentley’s show Wallflower is the winner of the Magners Share the Craic award, meaning she’s fully funded for her run and celebrating already being plastered all over the city.
Getting to Fringe through a comedy search, Irish comic Bentley hits the Underbelly stage with a high-energy debut touching on personal experience and issues.
The idea of Wallflower is about social awkwardness, media, and communication from the perspective of a performer who is very tongue in cheek.
Since receiving the award, the show has grown to just under half an hour; enough to shape material and form a relationship with the audience (“you’re here at half ten, after my bedtime”).
The fact that in the show I am watching she makes her entrance by accidentally kicking over someone’s drink seems relevant to a show that riffs on reputation, personality, and ‘what Ashlee does wrong’.
Being in the public eye comes with its issues for someone who has already been told they look like Chucky or “that woman from Baby Reindeer“. But Ashlee is deadpan about everything she tells us.
Comedy is therapy, after all “you have to listen to me, and they pay me”. Religion is fair game, home schooling even more, Ireland the most, with its “Facebook for the dead” allowing you to track funerals in your area.
This is a funny comic who I’d like to see more of. She’s self-aware, confident, and imaginative, and this set could easily be expanded to cover more topics or build on the ones that come up like beauty ideals, older men, mishearing words, or the honesty of children.
4 stars.
Ashlee Bentley: Wallflower continues at Edinburgh Fringe until 30 Aug.
I reviewed from a recording supplied by Ashlee’s PR.