Review: Alex Hines: Putting on a Show

There’s a lot of adjectives you could throw at Putting on a Show. Chaotic. Unhinged. Frantic. Surreal. Puerile. Melodramatic. You’d be in safe company: comedian Alex Hines has similarly thrown anything to hand at her high-production meat grinder of an Edinburgh hour. Rap. Power ballads. Horror. Mind-reading. Two truths and a lie. Video. A fart joke. But this is much more than the sum of its lists.

Firstly, here is that this show has real shape, from a faltering and wrong-footing bit of ‘stand-up’ at the start, through a fever-pitch denouement involving a murderous but basically misunderstood umbilical cord, to a show stopping number from a star of Hollywood’s golden years. Sure, the specifics of the story are mince, but this is much less a thought than a feeling.

Second, elements of this are a technical marvel. There’s few performers who can deliver such a collage of tone and styles with such assuredness, and get in and out of each bit so slickly. Some lovely moments combine a tolerance for chaos with a tightness and discipline that holds this together. “You don’t need to make it interesting. Everyone is watching me,” she says during some pacey audience interaction. This is a high tech show but we’re never left with the sense that Hines is held up by production. On one occasion tonight her tech fails, but she sails through. There isn’t a non glib answer as to what this all means. There’s something about the frenetic vacuity of internet culture, and at times one wonders whether Putting on a Show simply regurgitates this. But at least one wonders.