One thing about Eva Peroni? She’s precocious. At just 22, she’s not only become a buzzy name on the Scottish comedy club circuit, but landed a major venue for her very first Fringe run. Characteristically, she’s approaching this landmark moment in her nascent career with aplomb.
Peroni benefits from the gleeful tenacity of youth, probing the audience’s boundaries with dicey punchlines delivered without fear of retribution. (Of her dual Irish Republican and Traveller background, she jokes; “When I see a caravan, I don’t know where to live in it or blow it up.”)
At times, nerves are papered over with overdone bravado and her amped-up persona could be dialled down a notch. Not least because this might give us more time to process the rapid-fire of one-liners delivered throughout the show: balaclavas being described as the ultimate neurodivergent masking, various riffs slagging off her West Lothian hometown, and jabs about Bathgate’s “generational munters” Susan Boyle and Lewis Capaldi.
The show bills itself as an exploration of the comic’s coming-of-age in Costa Rica but, really, it’s strongest on home soil: bringing fresh fire to age-old dissections of Scottish identity, from a young, queer, working class, and uncompromisingly leftist perspective.
Eva Peroni: Jungled, Gilded Balloon Teviot, until 30 Aug (not 17), 4.40pm