Bridget Christie - The Court Of King Charles II
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Siobhan Rhodes-Johnson in association with Festival Highlights
The Herald
When the 35-year-old mum of one from Gloucester was devising this seventeenth-century royalist comedy hour, securing a spooky venue that does a passable impersonation of the Tower of London might have seemed too good to be true. So Bridget can barely contain her delight performing in one of the latest rooms to be reclaimed from the bowels of Edinburgh's Old Town: somehow staging it in a badly-ventilated portable building in a car park would not have been quite as suited to Restoration stand-up.
Christie greets the audience as herself, but in House of Stuart attire, before returning as the Merrie Monarch, who ruminates on ancient and modern matters such as speed dating: "Why take just three minutes to get a wife when it can take a lifetime to get rid of her?" She attacks a wide range of subjects with assured enthusiasm, careering through the centuries with joyous aplomb.
Charles II is joined by our first terrorist, Guy Fawkes, played as a Scouse scally "Penny for the Guy" figure. Whether Osama bin Laden will be remembered on his own special day 400 years from now is a provocatively humorous question. A vicious comic spin is imagining American children pleading for a dime for the Bin. Christie plays Oliver Cromwell as a Welshman even more repressed than Little Britain's Daffyd, but still manages to work in a bit of flatulence-based audience participation.
Returning as Bridget, she glories in the horrors of honeymooning in Shetland. In December.
A revolutionary redefining of character comedy.
15 August 2007
