Review: Sofie Hagen: Banglord

Ostensibly one of the more ironic show titles in the Fringe brochure, Sofie Hagen has managed to craft an hour that marries queer romantic yearning with toxic, heterosexual infidelity. Frivolous in the present and often dark in its reaches into the past, Banglord roams just about everywhere tonally. The comic reveals stunning naivety in her accidental engagement with a sex worker while seeking therapy, accidentally stumbles into a meeting of souls on holiday in Italy and fantasises some cartoonishly fascistic tendencies, arguing for her right to bend the world to her unbending will because she'd obviously be a good dictator right?

To her born-again virgin, current circumstances, Hagen bolts the tale of her last relationship, when she was the scarlet woman in a tryst with a famous British comedian, and the cheating with another comic that proceeded it in Denmark, forcing her to leave for the UK. Although she dangles some suggestions of the identity of the former, she's careful not to be too indiscreet, though her residual loathing of both dreadful men is made abundantly clear. Continuing to patronise the friends who try to steer her safe, with this latest hour Hagen has arrived at the fullest realisation yet of her appealing, shtick-shifting blend of arrogance and self-deprecation, the boundaries of surface and substance entertainingly blurred.