16/08/26

Gilded Balloon, Teviot (The Billiard Room), Edinburgh

As we file into the Billiard Room, Olivia Raine Attwood is waiting there to greet us: a lean, hyperactive American in bright orange dungarees. She tells us that she’s an expert in matchmaking, a skill she acquired back in high school. Even from her earliest days, she assures us, she kept journals about her various classmates, listing their attributes and their failings. Indeed, she’s brought said journals along with her and shares pages of them via a PowerPoint display. Heartbreakingly, her teenage self also features prominently in the pages, always listed at the bottom of the league, somebody with no allure, no boobs and therefore no hope of ever attracting a partner.

There are recollections of early dates, most of them ending in disaster – and one man from the audience is enticed onto the stage to recreate a pivotal moment: her first kiss in a boy’s car. Attwood has a quirky physicality, her exaggerated gestures and gawky movements serving to amp up the humour. This is shown to its best effect in an extended sequence depicting a more recent event: she goes for a morning run after eating an Indian meal the night before – and halfway across the (very long) bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, suddenly realises she needs to take an urgent dump. As she frantically tries to extricate herself from the situation, her energy becomes ever more exaggerated and the laughter rises.

Okay, so she’s not exactly reinventing the wheel here but, if the object of the exercise is to make the audience laugh out loud, she succeeds in spades. Establishing a great rapport from the get-go, Attwood has us in her perfectly-manicured grip throughout her hour on stage.

Those looking to let off steam via raucous laughter will be sure to find it in Oops.

4 stars

Philip Caveney