***
Character comedy hasn't had a really good run on the Fringe since the breakthroughs of Otis Lee Crenshaw and Al Murray over a decade ago, but it is still alive and kicking if you look for it. Take Chastity Butterworth, for instance, the prim, long-skirted creation of Gemma Whelan, best known these days as Yara Greyjoy in Game of Thrones. The show is 'presented' by physical duo Pajama Men, but is very different to their style of quickfire clowning.
I say prim, but a large part of the humour of Chastity – named "after the famous belt" – comes from the juxtaposition of her buttter-wouldn't-melt demeanour and her frankly filthy innuendo and fondness for poppers and anal sex. She might look like a Victorian governess straight out of Turn of the Screw but Butterworth has a mind like a Shoreditch sewer. Smutty one-liners, vulgar anecdotes and potty-mouthed poetry pour forth at every opportunity. At one point Butterworth humbly apologises for not feeling her best: "I got twisted off my tits on mescaline last night."
This is a show that depends a little on audience participation and on the day I saw it things were a bit flat. But that was no fault of Whelan, who obviously has a bright two-pronged future as both a character comedian and a straight actor (she is also in a play on the Fringe). I think Edinburgh visitors may have been stunned into silence by having three rainless days in a row and they weren't quite match fit for making the honking sound that has become comedy shorthand for breasts. Butterworth, however did her best, pulling a few volunteers from the audience to act out a little play and to try out her seduction advice.
Elsewhere the central set-piece, part from a series of one-liners that are sometimes offbeat, sometimes corny, is Butterworth's plans for a threesome, which involves that comedy staple, online video dating. This does, however, give Whelan a chance to show off her gender-bending versatility, playing a range of aspiring male candidates onscreen from the sleazy to the downright institutionalised. A quick costume change and one of them springs off the screen and onto the stage.
If this hour feels a little like a television pilot, complete with bloopers reel at the end (albeit slightly worrying when that gets some of the biggest laughs) that's no bad thing. As Game of Thrones has proved the screen clearly loves Whelan. This is not cutting edge comedy, It is the kind of thing Joyce Grenfell or Beryl Reid might have done fifty years ago if they had appeared on the Fringe. Although somehow I don't think they would have ever confessed to being as buzzed as a badger.
