One of numerous acts this fringe whose Covid-delayed debuts really feel lengthy overdue, Leo Reich makes up for misplaced time in spectacular style with Actually Who Cares?! Fairly incontrovertibly, it marks the arrival of a brand new star – which received’t shock Reich, whose immense ego and self-fascination is its presiding joke. “I'll by no means not exist / As a result of I'm life’s protagonist” runs one in every of a number of sung interludes that garnish the 23-year-old’s introductory hour. Right here then is one other – top-of-the-line – of these exhibits that style the Gen-Z expertise (efficiency as id; all the things commodified; a burning world) into uproarious, bleak-brilliant comedy.
In doing so, it clearly treads within the footsteps of acts like Kate Berlant, Catherine Cohen and earlier than them Bo Burnham. Reich doesn’t opine on his generational expertise, he embodies it, parading his now-booming, now-brittle self-regard earlier than us like so many Instagram pictures. Like Berlant, he considers the viewers privileged to be in his firm. Like Cohen, he sings about having intercourse with individuals who hate him. However in Reich’s fingers, none of this feels stale, as he hyperbolises the trauma of rising up queer, bemoans the burdens of maturity (“we're made to do the emotional labour of understanding stuff about issues”) and posits Love Island as a metaphor for our troubled instances.
Reich is an absolute grasp of this materials, delivering it with a camp flounce right here, an exaggerated pout there – and at all times in inverted commas. If every now and then one in every of his many veils of irony appears briefly to withdraw, isn’t the purpose that irony is the reality for Reich’s cohort of twentysomethings, and artifice the mortar with which they assemble their personalities? Unable to recall his precise beliefs (he misplaced the cellphone on which he’d jotted them down), and obscure on what he truly feels (there’s a wealthy operating joke about how appearing oppressed, or completely happy, triggers the identical endorphins as the true factor), there’s a bleakness Reich incorporates into his work with none sacrifice of pleasure. The gags right here, in any case – there’s a cracker about homosexual monogamy and the oppression of ladies – are top-drawer, and the present a must-see.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, till 28 August.
Post a Comment