Cornish comedian Harriet Dyer makes no secret of her storied relationship with her own mind, which we get to watch fizz over for the full 60 minutes that she’s on stage for the aptly-named Easily Distra…
Making a selling point of being quick to move on to the next thing is a stroke of genius. Who’s going to complain about tangents in a show all about them? Especially when they’re this much fun.
It seems wherever Dyer goes, chaos follows. Cornwall, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol – they’ve all been so full of drama that she’s starting to think she’s the problem. Each anecdote is delivered with the sort of self-exasperated matter of factness that comes from a lifetime of having to accept that the tendency to, say, write off cars or accidentally subscribe to monthly slug deliveries from the internet, is just what you’re like.
“You’ve heard what made it in to the show, imagine the stuff that didn’t!” Dyer quips in acknowledgment of the madness, but it’s astonishing to imagine she has even more stories to tell. The average comedian, leaving the typical pauses between gags and extrapolating every drop from a sentence, could frankly stretch out the amount of material on display into three Fringe shows, not one. But Dyer is no average comedian. Coming from her, who cares about the machine-tooled approach?
Delivered with her sixth sense for the perfect sounds and faces to top it all off, it’s a joy to be injected with such a concentrated dose of comedy.
Harriet Dyer: Easily Distra…, Monkey Barrel Comedy (Cabaret Voltaire), until 30 Aug (not 17), 8.35pm