Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Beyond its larky interactive stunts and impersonations, the standup’s restart-the-show gimmick coheres into an affecting personal story of redemption
The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows, Abby Wambaugh titles her fringe debut. It’s a catchy concept, and as our host wheels through the first handful of her 17 openings, the fun is in imagining the full-length shows each implies. But the gimmick wouldn’t sustain if it weren’t revealed as a smokescreen for something richer, relating to a painful personal experience that the show, and Wambaugh’s standup career, exists in part to redeem.
As directed by Lara Ricote, The First 3 Minutes (for which Wambaugh has been nominated for a best newcomer award) is a masterpiece of construction, an anthology of dotty creative ideas that resolves into an affecting story of the comic’s miscarriage, and of the value of beginnings that never reach a middle and an end. But you won’t see that coming as we begin, with Wambaugh impersonating a vacuum cleaner, then delivering two variations on autobiographical standup, introducing our host as non-binary, a Denmark resident and a mum. The next “first three minutes”, in the style of New York storytelling club The Moth, recounts Wambaugh’s experience of first discovering she was pregnant, 11 years ago.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 26 August
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