Despite all the gripes and groans about escalating costs the Edinburgh Fringe anticipation seems to be growing. Last night's 99 Club Bursary Showcase has become an established pre-Fringe staging post for ambitious female and non-binary acts taking their debut shows to Edinburgh. Previous showcases have featured future stars including Sarah Keyworth and Catherine Bohart. There are no outright winners any more, but two acts receive £500 each and the others £100. Even if the money is not huge, just getting to the showcase should be a great confidence boost.
First up was Amy Mason who, instead of the usual "who do I resemble?" opening gambit went for a quick game of charades. There wasn't a lot of input from the audience but her answer, which we won't reveal, did nicely set out her dryly sarcastic stall. Mason clearly had a good back story to tell. Approaching forty during lockdown she came out as gay and split up with her (male) husband. This was a meaty subject and gave her plenty of material to deal with.
The delivery was downbeat and deadpan with a whiff of Jo Brand about it. At one point she talked about dating men and one particularly creepy, bad experience in an alleyway. The story had a dark streak and also set up an exquisite reference later on. Mason may not have been the best act of the night but she probably had the best line out of the five acts.
Next up Sarah Roberts was one of a couple of performers on the bill whose reticence turned into something of a virtue. She started off nervously and it was hard to tell whether this was part of her stage persona or genuine nerves. But as the act went on the nervousness seemed to fall away, even when she started talking about suffering from anxiety long before it was fashionable - as if mental illness was a band that the cool people get into long before the rest.
Impressive anecdotes about her difficult same sex school youth maybe explained where her personality came from, but the set felt a little disjointed to me. Some routines in the 10-minute time frame were stronger than others and they didn't quite connect up. But when it came to judging she was a popular choice and picked up one of the £500 bursaries.
After a break Katie Green was a more mainstream prospect, a new-to-me American comic oozing with the confidence and stagecraft we've come to expect from Americans onstage. Either she is a natural stand-up or she has a fair bit of experience.
Her stories did not really break any boundaries but they were delivered with heaps of gusto. She also did such a good English accent that at one point I wondered if the English accent was genuine and the American accent was fake. But presumably the US origins are genuine, she had a great riff about living in LA and dating a rapper and being expected to fit around him spitting rhymes.
Another American, Kemah Bob, is better known over here, having already established herself in the UK and appeared on numerous television programmes, including Richard Osman's House of Games.
It was no surprise that Bob picked up the other £500 prize. What was surprising was that she picked it up with a routine all about salt. For ten minutes she talked all about the rise of sea salt as if she was competing in an extended edition of Just A Minute, finding different angles to explore the British relationship with seasoning and how salt has become posh and "bourgie" - as that annoying upper class twit on Gogglebox calls it it's an "affordable luxury".
Even if you weren't impressed by the subject, Bob certainly sold her material. And when she got to the end there was a pay-off that made it all worthwhile and justified the judges handing her the other big prize.
The final act of the night, Caitriona Dowden, was more of a curveball and my personal favourite. Dowden is a philosophy and religious studies graduate currently doing an even more esoteric PhD and while she talked about topics such as religion and considering being a nun in her set she did it in a way that quickly won over the crowd.
Like Sarah Roberts earlier there seemed to be a nervousness here that might or might not have been part of her act. Dowden glanced at her watch so many times I wondered if she had had her set etched into the glass. But there was a lot going on here, from personal origin story anecdotes to showing us graphs about how she prefers organised fun to spontaneous fun, so maybe she was genuinely concerned that she didn't overrun - though it would be odd to worry about overrunning within a couple of minutes of coming on.
I'd have liked to have seen Dowden pick up one of the top prizes, but hopefully getting into this showcase with give her a boost heading to the Fringe. Who knows, it might even help her to have some spontaneous fun.
