Laughing on the other side: the fringe shows turning painful breakups into comedy

Whether Elf Lyons’ high-concept Hollywood throwback, Kate Dehnert’s disorientating rave or Ele McKenzie’s Bob Dylan fantasy, heartbreak fuels fine humour at the festival Breakups.

We’ve all been through them.

Sometimes they’re mutual, sometimes not.

Sometimes agony, sometimes relief.

And sometimes, they’re world-shattering bereavements that seem to end, or at least upend, everything.

That’s the experience two comedy shows seek to express on this year’s fringe – an experience that can’t be captured by the usual conventions of the medium.

Wry wisecracks into a microphone just won’t cut it.

A whole new form is required.

Perhaps formal innovation isn’t such a shock when Elf Lyons is the innovator, as almost all of this dedicated nonconformist’s work has been entirely bespoke.

But even for her, The Woman on the Edge is something different: shards of a disintegrating sense of self, grafted together to suggest the journey Lyons has been on since her relationship ended, shortly before her wedding day, early last year.

The conceit is that the show is being performed by a Norma Desmond-alike alter ego.

A brittle and wise-cracking refugee from vintage Hollywood, smoke plumes from her décolletage as she fills in for absent Elf while keeping at bay her husband, the clown Pagliacci, on the end of the phone.

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