***
Claudia O'Doherty's shows are certainly different. Last year's Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated show The Telescope played around with the time-space continuum and featured O'Doherty in various guises onscreen and onstage. This time she is even more revolutionary. She performs large chunks of Pioneer from behind a transparent screen on which words and slogans are projected.
The result is never less than interesting and certainly intermittently mindblowingly brilliant (I guess the promoters will cut the word "intermittently" out of that phrase for their posters) but I'm not quite sure if it holds together. The theme is the story of the gushy performer's attempts to become a big star, but after an hour it feels like the show has not gone anywhere. Instead you have just seen about six different smart intros stapled together.
O'Doherty is clearly an original talent, but sometimes too oblique. A running joke is that the show is sponsored by electronics giant Pioneer, but it is never clear whether this is a conceptual gag or true. Likewise she appears in character onscreen as alternate versions of herself, but on the night I went these images were very faint – was that intentional and symbolic or a technological glitch?
There are, however, some glorious gags. O'Doherty is never less than fully committed to putting on a show, running around and even breaking into song because, as she says, she "loves to entertwain" – she claims one of her inspirations is Shania Twain. Every now and again the celebratory caption "She's Outta The Cave" flashes up, backed by a musical blast of Shania. I wondered if this was the most elaborate Fringe in-joke ever, as I thought that last year O'Doherty performed in the Cave venue, but I just checked and she performed in 2012 in the Underbelly.
This is undoubtedly the most technically innovative show I've seen in Edinburgh in years, but I'm not sure if awards should be given out for multi-media inventiveness. O'Doherty is as much an artist as a comedian. Maybe she should aim for the Turner Prize instead. Pioneer is highly recommended if you want a break from blokes-in-jeans-in-front-of-mics, but sometimes it just feels as if the style has got in the way of the content. Much the same way as the onstage screen literally gets in the way of O'Doherty.
