Review: Heidi Regan Gives Birth Live On Stage Every Night or Your Money Back

Heidi Regan, photo by Karla Gowlett

Heidi Regan has got serious. So serious, in fact, that she's got PowerPoint for her 2022 Fringe hour (and is trying to make a baby, to which we'll come). And slides mean structure – a structure which Regan largely sticks to in this enjoyable collection of nerdy, deliberately overwrought gags and delightfully odd thought experiments. It's hard, really, to imagine Regan bristling at almost anything. The low-status, lovable persona which she uses as a stylish vehicle for her comedy comes across as pretty amenable to anything. Anything, that is, except the constrants of a slide deck. It's hard to escape the feeling that, despite some wonderful moments, she's made an unecessarily formal rod for her distintively informal back.

The best moments come when she draws attention to that formality, launching into the sort of ideas that shouldn't go anywhere near a business presentation with an awkwardness which draws attention to just how fun and inventive they are. A drawn out exposition of her favourite joke in the set isn't so much a deadpan deconstruction of the joke, more a deliberately self-indulgent layering and accreting on top of a notably shaky foundation. It's like a joke Jenga, unfathomable, fantastical and inspiring in its ability to remain standing.

But too often the set pieces peter out with an offhand "so, yeah..." to link to the next 'bit'. It does a disservice to the care with which she weighs out the beats of the majority of her punchlines. And an unresolved baby narrative, while it provides some moments of pathos, feels like an unecessary anchor which Regan has chained herself to for no good reason. Somewhere in Regan's encyclopaedic knowledge of fantasy and sci-fi, surely there's a quote to the effect of: "rule the slides; don't let the slides rule you."