Best of the Fringe

Clive Anderson’s show about Macbeth, ‘the greatest drama ever written’, offers us an hour of polished comedy loosely themed around the Scottish play. Shakespeare’s material is still topical, he says, ‘a clever Scot with a rampantly ambitious wife, like Michael Gove and Sarah Vine’. He prefers Macbeth to Hamlet which is ‘about some bloke who can’t make up his mind, like a three-and-a-half-hour interview with Jeremy Corbyn’. The act’s centrepiece is Anderson’s memory of his infamous encounter with the Bee Gees who stormed out of his TV chat show in 1996. He’d been encouraged to mock pop stars by Sting who enjoyed being teased about his stage name. ‘Sting is a minor skin-wound,’ Anderson told him. ‘So why Sting? Why not Scratch or Burn or Prick?’ But the Bee Gees took umbrage when they told Anderson that they used to perform as ‘Les Tosseurs’. ‘You’ll always be tossers to me,’ blurted Anderson. And off they went.

Girlfriend From Hell — The Bitch is Back is a small show with a huge range performed by Gabby Killick. She satirises the horrors of dating in the internet age by personifying the familiar demons of urban living. ‘Chardonnay’ is a chic, dependable good-time girl. ‘Twitter’ is a needy sponger with an addictive personality. Killick’s comedy has a strong theatrical flavour. She’s a great impersonator with a spontaneous love of words. I expect she has a play in her.

Bismillah! An Isis Tragicomedy is set in an Iraqi basement where a Yorkshire squaddie, Dean, has been captured and tied to a lap-dancing pole by terrorists. His guard, Danny, is a jihadi from London and the two Englishmen form an unlikely bond. The storyline is not hard to predict but the actors put the show across with bundles of charm and energy.